Teenage Genin Ninja Heroes
by valles
Summary: There are Powers who move people between the universes like pieces on a game board. One such moved a piece to Konoha, and this is what came of it. A shameless selfinsert starring Team Seven, the author, and Hyuuga Hinata, Absolute Badass.
1. Test

disclaimer: I have no legal right to the use of the characters, situation, or setting of Masashi Kishimoto's _Naruto_, and hereby attest that I have received no monetary remuneration for the following story or their appearances in it. Further, if the legitimate owners of one of the various incarnations of _Naruto_ should wish to make use of any of the characters, situations, plotlines, etc. original to the following, then with the exception of the _name_ (not character, name) Nathan Baxter/Bakusuta Neshan, I hereby irrevocably grant them the right to do so either with or without my further knowledge, compensation or consent.

In short, Naruto isn't mine, I'm getting no payment for this, and the only thing _I_ came up with for this that I'd object to the franchise's real owners using in the real series would be my own name.

**TEENAGE GENIN NINJA HEROES**

chapter 1:

TEST

_APRIL, 12TH YEAR AFTER THE ATTACK OF THE KYUUBI_

"Pft. Like a Jounin is going to fall for such an obvious trap."

And he didn't, simply by virtue of opening the door before he walked through it.

"HEY!" Naruto shouted. "What's the idea of wasting so much of our time and then not even having the decency to fall into my trap!"

**Hah!** Sakura's Inner Self crowed. **He just incriminated himself! Whatta yutz!**

The Jounin blinked. "Trap?"

"That idiot set the eraser to fall out of the doorjamb, sensei," Sakura said.

Their sensei crouched to pick up the fallen object, and the three students took the moment to evaluate him.

He was probably in his late teens or early twenties, Sasuke decided, which was very young for a Jounin. Average height or slightly below, depending on his exact age, but built heavily - almost certainly a strength oriented fighter. His choice of clothing and its numerous layers - coat over flak jacket over shirt - were almost certainly intended to conceal something significant hidden all across his body. For weaknesses, the way he seemed to turn his head whenever he wanted to look at something would indicate poor peripheral vision, which would mean that his spectacles were actually needed for corrective purposes and would weaken him if they were lost.

_Waitaminute,_ Sakura thought. _He's that guy from our Academy class's trips to the Archives. But he's only a little older than us! And a Jounin already...?_

_His eyes... aren't cold..._ Naruto realized, and decided then and there that he'd do anything rather than disappoint the second teacher to acknowledge him. Not that he had to let him _know_ about it, of course.

The man studied the eraser in his hand for a moment, then frowned and tossed it casually into the tray under the blackboard, most of the way across the room. "Not funny." He took a deep breath, then held it for a moment as he looked at each of the three members of Genin Team 7 in turn.

Boy, sitting. Black hair, somewhat crested. Forehead protector in the usual place. Dark blue tunic, short sleeves, high collar. White shorts, sandals, and bracing wraps on calves and forearms.

Boy, standing. Short for his age, blonde hair, messy and sticking up all over the place. Bright orange jacket and pants, somewhat too large, with the cuffs rolled up and out of the way. Three whisker-like scars across each cheekbone, and the most arresting bright blue eyes.

Girl, standing. Dress, bright red, short-sleeved and close fitting, with a waist-height slit on either side for free movement. Dark blue bike shorts underneath for modesty. Forehead protector tied across the top of her head, to hold back a sheaf of long - and, apparently, natural - pink hair. Her eyes were nearly as unusual, a shade of aqua, midway between blue and green, he had never seen before.

He let his breath out in a rush, then smiled. "So! Who's for hibachi?"

"My name," he said across their table's grill, "is Nathan Baxter - Bakusuta Neshan, to phrase it a way you can pronounce. I'm seventeen years old, and a Jounin-level specialist in written seals and permanent effects."

Naruto scowled. "Huh?"

Sakura glared, and resisted the urge to smack him upside the head.

**Come on!** Inner Sakura howled. **You know you want to!**

Beating up her teammate definitely wouldn't impress their sensei... even if he -was- an idiot. "Naruto! We covered this only last month! A written seal is a way of controlling chakra and forming it into patterns away from your body! They're the reason curse seals and jutsu scrolls work!"

Neshan's carefully neutral face flashed into a broad, slightly goofy grin. "Bingo! You get a gold star, girl. That's exactly correct, and curse seals are only the start of it. There are probably some things that you can't do with them, but I haven't found one yet.

"Anyway, my hobbies are reading novels and doing research. I like teriyaki, my own cooking, and peace and quiet. I dislike people who act without thinking or hurt others for no good reason. My dream..." His smile turned quiet. "I wanna save the world."

The three kids blinked. He looked at Sakura, and his smile broadened back into a mischievous grin. "So, what about you?

She nibbled at her bottom lip for a moment, then said, "I'm Haruno Sakura. The thing I like is..." she blushed, and her eyes skittered involuntarily towards her dark-haired teammate. "... a certain person. My dream is to be with and marry him. The things I dislike - Thank you," she said to the chef as her plate arrived. "- are Naruto..." She made a face. "...and people who make fun of my forehead. My hobbies are taking care of my fish and..." She blushed again, and very carefully did -not- look at her crush.

After a second or two of awkward silence, Neshan looked at the crushed looking blond boy sitting to her left for a moment, then told the dark-haired one on her opposite side, "Okay, so, you next, Uchiha-san."

"Hn. My name is Uchiha Sasuke. No likes, many dislikes. My d- no, dream isn't right. My ambition is to resurrect my clan and kill... a certain man."

"Uchiha Itachi."

Sasuke tensed, every muscle going visibly rigid. "Yes."

Neshan looked at him for a long moment, then nodded. "We'll need to talk about this later."

"Hn."

"Okay. Your turn, Loudmouth."

"Loudmouth! I'm not-" Naruto shouted, standing up and leaning on the counter.

"Standing up and bellowing in the middle of a restaurant?" the older boy asked dryly, before thanking the cook as his order was slid into place.

Naruto closed his mouth and plopped back down into his seat. "Hmph. Anyway, my name is Uzumaki Naruto! I like cup ramen! And Sakura-chan!"

Sakura shuddered, as though at a sudden chill.

"What I dislike is the three minutes it takes cup ramen to cook. My dream is to become Hokage, so that everyone in the village will have to acknowledge my existence!"

Neshan swallowed his mouthful of beef. "We'll start on that day after tomorrow, then. If you pass."

"What!"

"But we already _did_ pass!"

Naruto and Sakura exploded into protest, and Sasuke nodded to the chef as his food was delivered.

The Jounin held out a hand, palm down, and tipped it side to side for a moment. "Yes and no. You passed the Academy exams, which determined whether or not you possessed the necessary practical skills of a Genin. What you still need to prove is that you have the required character traits."

Sakura blinked. "What traits?"

"Now, now... that would be telling."

"Can't you give us a hint?"

"I could, yes... If you were also willing to accept having the test's difficulty cranked about five, ten notches. If you know what you're supposed to be doing, I'm not going to be satisfied with your simply doing it - you'll have to_ live_ it, flesh and blood and skin and bone."

"So! That's easy for a future Hokage! Whatsit, whatsit!"

Neshan started to crack each joint of each of his fingers, one at a time. "Okay, that's one vote for. Sakura, Sasuke?"

Sakura nibbled at her lower lip. "Overnight... No. No, maybe if it was a week, but not just one night." **What! What are you, a chicken! Go for it, girl!**

"I don't need any shortcuts."

"Okay, so. 'No' it is, then. Training Ground Four, nine o'clock. Don't eat breakfast, you'll only lose it."

A stiff northerly breeze added a bit of bite to the late spring air and stirred the tops of the forest to rustling confusion.

"It's nearly 9:10. Is he _always_ late?" Sakura asked plaintively.

"Unfortunately," said a voice behind her.

"Ya!" Naruto fell flat on his ass trying to turn around and jump away at the same time.

"Eep!" So did Sakura.

skish! Sasuke, on the other hand, managed it perfectly.

Neshan walked past them, winding a timer, which he then set on one of the three short, sturdy poles lined up at the edge of the field. "Okay. Two hours, fifty minutes." He turned around to face them and fished two small, round bells out of some inner pocket of his coat. "Two bells. Get one, you pass the test. When the timer goes off, we break for lunch. If you don't have a bell by then, I tie you to a stump and steal your food. Hour later, you get to try again. Still don't have one by four, and it's back to the academy."

He tucked the bells out of sight again and looked at them seriously. "You're Genin. I'm a Jounin. If you don't go all out, you won't even have a hope."

_Two bells..._ Sasuke thought. _Smart... the weakest fails, and the team is stronger._

**Hell yeah, Seal Boy! I'm gonna kick your ass!** Inner Sakura snarled, eyes aflame. _There are only two bells, but... _Sakura mused back. "Neshan-sensei?"

"Yes?"

"If we get a bell in the first round... do we have to keep it the whole time, or can we give it back without forfeiting?"

He looked surprised - and impressed. "Clever girl... Yes, you may, although you may -not- give it to one of your teammates and have him also pass."

And that made it all clear. "Teamwork..." she murmured, under her breath.

"Any other questions?"

"Yeah!" Naruto yelled. "What if we get _both_ bells!"

Neshan looked pained. "Not so _loud_, please."

"Yeah, yeah. Well?"

"Planning sabotage? Deliberately ruining your teammate's chances is an instant fail."

"There are only two bells," Sasuke said. "Two people can succeed, yes, but only at the expense of the third."

"You heard Sakura's question, didn't you?" the Jounin snapped.

The last Uchiha finally showed an expression - frustration. "What does -that- have to do with anything?"

Sakura put a hand on his arm. "Sasuke-kun... If a person who got a bell in the first round gives it back before the second, he's already passed - but -both- of the others have a chance at a bell of their own. Theoretically, up to four people can pass."

"Hn." His face was composed, but humiliation brought a faint tinge of red to his cheeks.

"Are there any other questions? No? Then on five... four... three... two... one... BEGIN!"

The three Genin launched themselves away and vanished into the forest. He shrugged off his long specialist's trench coat and tossed it over the top of one of stumps - a flanking one, not the central one holding the timer. Then he jerked his left arm straight - producing an audible crich from the cartilage in that elbow - and rotated that wrist through a hundred and eighty degrees - giving a similar but deeper gunch from that shoulder.

Then he turned, and walked after the crashing noises Naruto made as he moved through the underbrush.

"KAGE BUNSHIN NO JUTSU!"

Neshan stopped dead.

Three of the clones erupted from the bushes on the uphill side of the trail. Two more dropped from the branches overhead, and a sixth lunged out from underneath what had - apparently - been a small, grass-covered hillock.

Bushes, center. Punch in the nose. Duck left, lay that elbow across that clone's temple. Right clone misses entirely and goes over the cliff; won't see -him- again. Airborne right grabs wrist, snag airborne left by the jacket. Pitch the first at the real one lunging out of cover and whip the other up, over, and down straight into the dirt.

All of them simultaneously bamf!ed away into a bank of smoke.

"_All_ of them were...? A probe... and then..."

BA-KOOOOOM

One hundred square feet of forest path and undergrowth vanished in a pillar of flame and smoke as the carefully laid circle of explosion notes went off as one.

Thirty feet away, a small crater dished itself out of the earth and stone under the Jounin's feet as his arcing leap ended. His eyes flickered to either side, cataloging the various traps set around him and how they left a slowly narrowing wedge of 'free' space, pointing away from his previous position.

Another dozen clones erupted from the undergrowth and lunged to the attack. Most - eight - vanished in a single sweep of his naginata. Reverse the pole to catch one of the remaining ones with the butt, turn slightly, spinning the weapon to slam a clout across the temple of a second and let momentum carry it safely out of the way in the off hand while dropping an elbow across the head of the third - unexpected resistance, _that's_ the real one and he's got a kunai out and's-

dingledingle

WHAM The sidekick exploded out without any sort of conscious thought, catching the clone just under dead center in the chest and sending it crashing into the sturdy trunk of a nearby tree. The impact shattered bark in a ring taller than it was, and sent a rain of twigs and leaves rattling down out of the branches. One beat, two, and the Henge collapsed as Sakura dropped to the ground and, almost, her knees before struggling back upright, battered but game for more.

dingleSCREEKdingBAM-WHAK The kunai strike executed simultaneously with Naruto's grab for the bell had been intended as a distraction, so that the pain from the wound would break the Jounin's concentration enough to let him get free and disengage. Instead, however, it cut through vest and shirt before skittering aside from something underneath with a scream of metal-on-metal. Without that slight covering edge, the grab was just a fraction too slow to reach its goal before a retaliatory fist knocked him back several steps and straight into the spinning haft of the naginata. _That_ impact sent him flying off to one side to fetch up hard against a snare trap.

"KATON: GOUKAKYUU NO JUTSU!" Sasuke's voice came from behind him, back towards the path. With trap fields laid to either side of him, the only direction open was towards the point of the triangle - where Sakura was waiting and ready.

FOOOOOM

He didn't move even a single muscle as the expanding ball of fire rolled over him.

All three students stared wide-eyed. _No way,_ Naruto thought. _Damn bastard Sasuke's not tough enough to take out a Jounin that way._

The flames cleared, and there he was, standing slightly singed but mostly intact in the center of a charred, twenty foot wide crater. "Ow."

"No way!" Sakura squeaked, and Naruto actually stopped trying to wriggle his way out of the trap (he hadn't been having much luck, anyway. Being inverted like that was throwing him off.) to stare in awe.

"All right, Sasuke," and his voice was soft and quiet, enough so that it should have vanished into the constant quiet noises of the forest, but the hard edge of it still reached their ears as clearly as though he had been leaning over their shoulders. "If that's the way you want to play the game..." and between one word and the next he had covered the entire distance between them in a flicker too quick to register as motion "...then let's dance the light fantastic."

THUDhurk-krakBAM The first blow was a punch, low and sharp and right where it would best disrupt Sasuke's breathing. The Genin collapsed halfway, gagging, until his face met a knee going the other direction and was knocked - with the rest of him following dutifully along - up and out, into the zone where the other leg's heel could impact with the greatest combined proportion of all available muscular, positional, and rotational energy.

The lights went out even before his body had hit the ground, but were brought abruptly back as his rag-doll tumble brought him up - hard - against an inconveniently protruding piece of deadfall. Even awake, however, all he could do was lie in place and try to assemble the world around him into a single, coherent piece - which would then, hopefully, stop _spinning_ like that.

"Sasuke-kun!" Sakura almost choked on her fear - and horror. **The hell? What happened to the wiseass that bought us dinner last night?**

A single kunai snapped from its hidden pocket to the Jounin's right hand, flipped in place from a fighting to a throwing grip, froze a moment - then flicked to the other hand and twirled between those fingers, knocking aside that - relatively small - percentage of the barrage of incoming shuriken which would have threatened unprotected flesh rather than savaging vegetation or clattering off of hidden armor.

Naruto glared at him, face and demeanor, for once, entirely serious. "I won't let you hurt him. Even if he _is_ a bastard."

The effect was somewhat spoiled by the fact that he was still hanging upside down by one leg.

A cocked eyebrow and a slightly sadistic smile. "Oh no?" The kunai rotated around his index finger into a throwing grip.

"Eep!" thwipTHOCKslipthud If Naruto hadn't twisted out of the way - bending himself almost double in the process - then he would have died. Instead, the flying dagger whipped through the space where his head had been and buried itself literally hilt-deep into the sapwood of the tree behind. The violent maneuver managed to do what none of his earlier efforts had accomplished, however, and dropped him firmly on his head as Sakura's knot finally slipped loose.

A reflex neuron in the back of Naruto's brain reached up and gave his adrenal glands a good hard yank. _Incoming!_ He rolled to his right and kicked off, trying to get out of the way before-

Too late! The kick - with all of Neshan's airborne, armored mass behind it - wouldn't land across his temple like it must have been planned to (no, wait, he'd been upside-down, which would've put his... Itai! That just wasn't _fair_!) but it was still going to-

Pass straight through and leave the larger boy to crash gracelessly against the already-abused tree which had supported the snare trap.

"Ha!" Naruto crowed. "Bunshin no Jutsu! Now I'm gonna get ya!"

"...fuckin' _clones_ playin' goddamn _mindgames_ nothin' where it should be so it won't fuckin' _die_..." was the rough text of the stream of profanity growled into the leaf-covered loam of the forest floor. He pulled himself to hands and knees and glared murderously at the individual responsible. "I hate that fucking jutsu. I really do." He went from kneeling to crouching to an all out lunge in a fraction of second, legs and body fully extended to drive a speared right hand towards the Genin's stomach.

The target threw himself back, eyes wide in a combination of fear and triumph. _He's overextending! Not even a Jounin can-_

An instant before the strike came the closest it could have, sixty-four streams of pure chakra erupted from various points scattered across his body, spiraling up his legs and across his torso to wrap themselves in a vortex around his leading arm before concentrating down to a single point about two inches in front of his hand.

A point which promptly exploded, tearing a teardrop-shaped crater in the forest floor and throwing Naruto hundreds of feet in a single high arc that terminated deep in the bowels of some laurel-like clump of undergrowth.

Neshan snarled and followed.

_Okay, Sakura. Think! Think! He's coming! You're the only one still standing, you have to last long enough for one of the others to recover. Then you can tag-team him, slow him down enough that you'll be able to get away. But -how-?_

_That's it!_

He knew she was hiding in the low bush, but ignored her. Finish the whiskered pain in the ass first, _then_ deal with cotton-candy girl.

One gauntleted hand came up, lightning-fast, and batted the incoming kunai away while the other brought out one of his own and sent it blasting...

Straight through a cloud of smoke and a smallish, Y-shaped log.

"Replacement isn't enough!" he roared, and sent a second kunai at the soft 'crunch' of a light-footed body landing on dried leaves. When his eyes followed its path he had time to see her finished the last seal an instant before the flying knife would have hit - so short a time that the replacing log actually appeared _behind_ it.

There was no betraying sound, this time, but his eyes still followed the motion as it led overhead and there she was, falling towards him, kunai looped over one finger and hands working the seals for a third swap. The change in angles slowed his response, just slightly, and he gritted his teeth as he followed the flicker away from his kunai striking -

That was the wrong sound. His eyes snapped back upwards. From the rip on the side of her dress, he had just barely missed (annoying, but he'd sacrificed some accuracy for the speed to hit her before she swapped - the motion he'd followed for that critical split second must have been a log or something she had either carried with her or planted ahead of time) and she had the kunai she'd been holding earlier raised and gripped firmly in both hands for an overhand strike with all her weight and falling inertia behind it.

And between the throw and his abortive tracking of the swap, he was badly out of position to meet that strike. He shifted one foot outward, twisted slightly -

She brought the blade down in a perfect textbook blow, not at the crown of the head, where the heavy bone of the skull might turn it, but down and in to hit the join between neck and shoulder, an area rich in soft tissue and large blood vessels, and almost certainly _not_ covered by that armor of his if it wasn't visible under normal clothing.

The universe flickered around her, and it was all she could do to manage any sort of proper landing with her trajectory drastically altered and a screaming knot of agony wrapping itself around her ribs.

Somewhere outside her field of vision, a leaf crunched.

crunch

crunch

crunch

Slow and measured, steadily closer. She tried to move - her body would not. _Could_ not, paralyzed by the bolts of pain shooting off of her ribs.

Sasuke's voice: "KATON: HOUSENKA NO JUTSU!"

Naruto's voice: "Sasuke, WATCH OUT!"

Gritting her teeth, she managed to raise the energy - and will - to turn her head to towards the sound of battle - just as it ended, with Neshan holding one elbow under Sasuke's armpit and that hand across the back of his neck, and the other arm holding a kunai ever-so-gently to the flutter of the main artery in his neck. Naruto stood only a few feet away, frozen in horror, with one arm still extended in the follow-through of a throw.

For a long, singing moment, everything was silent.

The kunai vanished, and the Jounin released his prisoner and stepped back. "You all pass."

Naruto wobbled, and fell flat on his face. "NANI!"

"We didn't get the bells." Sasuke had one hand resting carefully against his throat.

"No," Neshan answered seriously. "But you did work together. You were willing to protect each other in the face of lethal opposition. You conceived and executed successful stratagems under intense pressure. And you recognized and attempted to capitalize on the openings I gave you." He grinned. "This was never about the bells, remember?"

"...itatatatataiiii..."

"Sa- Oh, damn. I'm an idiot. Here, hold still..." He knelt and performed a quick series of seals, before brushing the bluish glow around his hands over the site of his earlier strike.

"You're a medic-nin, too?" Sasuke asked.

"Not hardly. Surgery, chemistry, anatomy, proper diagnosis... No. I know a few healing jutsu, and enough background to avoid making anything _worse_, but basically all I can do is first aid or simple things like, oh, fixing a cracked rib. How do you feel?" he asked Sakura.

"Better," she said softly. "You hit hard." **Bastard! I'll _get_ you for this!**

He looked embarrassed. "Sorry. I wasn't prepared to get caught out like that. I... er... Anyway! Training! Tactics. That fight just now - what did you think of it? Things you noticed, questions, comments. Your mistakes, my mistakes. Naruto, you first."

"Ano..." The shortest Genin sat with both arms and legs crossed, brow furrowed in thought. "Where did you get the naginata? And where did it go?"

"Ah." He held out his right hand, then turned it, slightly, so that the back of the gauntlet caught the light.

"Ahhh..." Sakura leaned forward to look at it closely. "I've seen that mark before... on a ninja scroll, I think."

"Exactly. It's a summoning seal, engraved into the plate of the armor itself. By channeling a small amount of chakra into it - like you would for, say, an explosion note - I can activate the seal and summon a specific, predetermined object to my hand."

"That jutsu you used on Naruto, what was it?" Sasuke asked.

"Shikouseibaku no Jutsu."

"Seigoshibakka-what?" Naruto mumbled.

"It's supposed to be triggered by physical contact rather than just in close proximity to the target. Used right, it puts a very big hole through, well, just about anything."

"But, you didn't use any seals," Sakura protested.

"_That_ is separate, and very difficult. I'd say that Sakura is the only one of you with the potential to learn it."

"But!" Naruto started to whine, until Neshan put a single upraised finger across his lips.

"Sshh! Rasengan is at least as good, and doesn't _ever_ need any seals. I can help you learn that, instead, once you're farther along."

"But you don't know it yourself," Sasuke guessed.

"No. But that's not as much a problem as you'd think, since every person who learns it basically has to recreate it from scratch and theory anyway. And, Sasuke, don't worry. You'll get your own turn when it's time."

The dark-eyed Genin leaned forward. "When is that?"

"When you can activate Sharingan. In the meantime, back on task. Sakura!"

"Yes?"

"What was my biggest mistake in that fight?"

She furrowed her brow in thought. "I'd say... letting us pick the ground and timing?"

"Good, but no. Once an ambush has failed - been detected - it can become as or _more _dangerous for the attacker than the defender."

"You lost your temper. Twice," Sasuke said.

"And if I really _had_ lost control, and done so in a real fight, that could well have been fatal. But any person's self-control must have limits, and occasional failures are a fact of the shinobi's life."

Naruto laughed. "You fell for a basic Bunshin!"

Neshan's composure finally broke, slightly - he looked faintly embarrassed. "Well, yes. That kind of is-he-or-isn't-he doublethink is a real problem for me. Lost the only exam I ever failed because of a Kage Bunshin. But in a fight, there isn't time to be right all the time."

Sasuke went next. "You made assumptions about Sakura's strategy which, with a bit less luck on your part, could easily have given her an opening for a killing shot."

**HELL YEAH! SCORE!**

A grin. "No, I _was_ tracking an actual replacement that time - it simply wasn't her being replaced. Which I never thought of, and so lost time identifying and reacting."

Two Genin stared at a blushing third. "Sakura-chan... sugoi..." Naruto breathed.

There was silence for a moment, then Sakura said, slowly, "If you had taken the time to fully neutralize Sasuke, he couldn't have come back to help me."

Their sensei grinned, fiercely. "Eee_xact_ly. I kept switching targets rather that following through on available openings - which was exactly what you were trying to force me to do.

"Now for something _less_ fun.

"Sakura. Although it was justified _this _time, taking attacks you don't have to is very risky, and should be avoided whenever possible. More importantly, no matter _how_ concerned you are about your teammates, _never_ reveal your position unless there's something to gain. Understand?"

"Yes, Sensei."

"Naruto. First, don't attract attention you can't dodge. Second, time you spend gloating is time that could have been spent _using_ that advantage - and time that your enemy can use to recover or strike back. Got it?"

"Yeah, yeah."

"Sasuke. If the enemy does something you don't expect, don't hold still while you figure out what to do. Evade! Dodge!"

"Understood."

"Great! Now for the good news! Naruto, that bunshin swap was flawless. Well done."

The addressed laughed and put his hand behind his head. "What did you expect from a future Hokage?"

"Sasuke, your tai and ninjutsu are the best in the squad. Good work."

"Hn." A slight smile behind the tented hands.

"And Sakura..." he grinned and bowed to her - deeply. "Unless I'm greatly mistaken, that backpack trick of yours is the first genuinely original variation on Kawarimi no Jutsu in the last fifty years. It's probably going to become a part of the standard repertoire - and I intend to make sure everyone knows it's yours."

"I... wow." **Hell YEAH!**

"In the meantime, we've got most of a day to kill. So. Training! We're going to improve your control over your chakra."

"What's so important about this 'sharka' stuff?" Naruto asked.

Sakura smacked him across the back of the head. "Baka! Chakra is what you use to power jutsu!"

"Eheheheh," Naruto smiled sheepishly. "I used to sleep through all the hard classes."

The Jounin had his hands against his temples, as though trying to massage away a headache. "Chakra is a mixture of physical energy pulled from your body's energy reserves and spiritual energy generated by your brain. The physical power, for lack of a better way of putting it, gives your chakra purchase on reality, allowing it to affect the real world in a way that pure spiritual energy never could. The spiritual component, first, allows you to control the amalgam's disposition with your mind rather than your nervous system, and second, acts as an amplifier for the physical component, letting it generate far greater effects than that amount of energy could otherwise account for."

"Huh?"

Neshan gave up, shook his head, and smiled. "Don't worry about it too much. All you really need to know is that chakra is generated by your body, that it can affect the physical world, and that you can control it either with your will or, for more complex effects like jutsu, by forming hand seals."

"We already do that," Sasuke said.

"If the degree of control could be likened to the sophistication of a weapon, all three of you are walking around with the equivalent of a chipped rock tied to a _stick_," was the wry reply. "But don't worry. Teaching you how to do better is _my_ job, not the Academy's. None of your peers will be any better, at this point."

"And the reason we _should_ learn better," Sakura said, "is that the simpler, mental sort of control is necessary to properly regulate the type and amount of chakra available for the hand seals to change and shape!" _Finally! I was never able to figure out what that book was talking about, before!_ **Hell yeah! You go, girl!**

"Exactly!" Neshan beamed at the girl who was fast becoming his favorite student. "If the proper chakra balance isn't fed into the seals, then the jutsu will fail, even if the physical component was performed perfectly. By improving your control, you gain the ability to better fine-tune what you're feeding into the jutsu - allowing you to cut margins closer and preserve your extra chakra for later use... which, in turn, is directly responsible for your being able to use more and larger jutsu."

"So how do we improve our control?" Sasuke asked.

"Climb a tree."

A number of crickets chirped in the following silence.

"Whaaat?" Naruto howled, "How does _that_ work?"

A chuckle. "By focusing a precise quantity of chakra into the soles of your feet, you can adhere to a vertical - or inverted - surface and thereby treat it as though it were the same as a horizontal one." He stood. "In other words, you can walk up walls." And, going to the nearest tree-trunk, he did so.

"No problem! I'll get to the top in no time!"

"It's harder than it sounds," the Jounin promised, with a dark smile. He hopped off the tree and down in front of his students. "Since concentration helps make it easier, I want you three to go to separate parts of the forest until you can make it to the top of the tree. Use a kunai to mark your highest level for each attempt, so as to keep track of your progress. I'll come by and check up on you one at a time - it'll give us a chance to have those private conversations I promised.

"Well? What are you three waiting for? Chop chop!"

"Uchiha, why were you so reluctant to work with the others?"

The black-haired boy stuck his kunai in the dirt and collapsed to catch his breath. "Everything went by the plan."

The Jounin reached down and plucked something out of the inside of his student's sleeve. "Listening Note," he said, displaying the small slip of paper.

"You knew everything. The whole time," Sasuke breathed.

"Yes. Answer the question."

"I didn't need their help."

Neshan sat down himself and poked the younger boy in the belly, eliciting a sharp hiss as he hit a still-developing bruise. "Empirical evidence would beg to differ. Besides, working together was the whole _point_."

"Having other people distract me will only hold me back."

"Who on earth told you _that_?"

Sasuke looked away, glaring into the forest. "My brother."

"And you trust him? This man who killed your family, murdered your parents in front of your eyes, you trust his honesty? Hell, you trust his _judgment_?"

The Genin's head snapped around to let him stare in shock. "I..."

Neshan looked back gently. "When he was your age, your brother was already an ANBU Captain. Even if he really, truly wanted to see you become strong enough to challenge him, _his _path isn't the same as _yours_. If you keep trying to become him, you'll never be able to move fast enough; never be able to close the gap."

Wrapped hands fisted, digging into the dirt and tearing grass out by the roots. "What else can I _do_?"

The older boy leaned back and looked at the sky, letting his breath out through his nose. "The Third is old. It's slowed him down. But at his best... do you think Itachi could have beaten him?"

"...No... I should ask him?"

"I'm sure he'd find the time if you did."

"Why not tell me yourself?"

A grin. "I could give you _my_ angle on it, which isn't necessarily the same thing."

"Please."

"All right." He closed his eyes and thought for a moment. "People have been trying for a long time to come up with the ideal traits of a soldier. There seem to be two main schools of thought; one of them you know already. The other, mine, is that a person with a healthy emotional life is going to display clearer judgment and, not having to fight through their own angst, show faster reaction times than someone who doesn't have a supportive family or reasonable surrogate. Having people to care about helps ensure that you'll keep a weather eye out on the eventual goal - protecting them, making them happy - rather than getting caught up in the distractions or problems of the moment. Also, the desire to return to them, or keep them from harm... can give you a deeper reserve of willpower that you'd never be able to tap otherwise..."

There was quiet for a while, while birds called and the canopy overhead whispered in the wind, then: "Thank you."

"De nada." Neshan stood, and offered a hand, grasped Sasuke's, and pulled him to his feet. "One last thing... A question you should think on. Is it more important that _you_ be the one to kill your brother, or just that he be dead?"

Naruto fell out of the tree and landed flat on his ass.

"Chikusho!" He sat there a moment, then stood and yelled: "I hope you blow over and _ROT_!"

"Not for another century or so, probably," Neshan said from behind him, prompting a jump and a startled yelp. "But, if it'd make you feel better, we can use it as a target once we start on offensive techniques."

The Genin perked up at the thought. "Ano sa, ano sa, why not do it now?"

"I want to have you three settled in and working well together before we start in on any of the higher level stuff. Anyway, sit down. We need to talk." He gestured, and perforce Naruto sat.

"Oh, yeah! You said you'd help me become Hokage!"

"I di-? Oh, right. Last night. Yeah, okay..." He closed his eyes and thought for a moment. "What do you think the Hokage does?"

"That's easy! He-" Naruto stopped mid-sentence, and squinted suspiciously at his teacher. "This is some kind of trap, isn't it!"

Neshan laughed. "Bingo! Caught! Yes, it is. Because, I bet you were going to say something along the lines of 'He's the guy who gives everyone else orders,' right?"

The younger boy could have been used as a study model for art class: 'Vulpine Suspicion.' "And he protects Konoha."

A chuckle, and he reached out and ruffled his student's hair. "All right. Now, the thing you need to understand first," and he leaned forward abruptly and gave Naruto an entirely serious look, "is that both of those statements are true - so far as they go. But leaving the description at _that _would be like saying that the sun is in the sky, or that a ninja is someone who uses shuriken."

"But that's not what a ninja is at all!"

"Exactly - it's a truth so incomplete as to be actively deceptive. Saying that the Hokage gives orders and protects Konoha isn't _quite_ that bad, since those two things _are_ what he does, but... There's a saying in my homeland: 'The Devil's in the details.' The first detail _here_ is that the Hokage gives orders _in order_ to protect Konoha."

"Huh?"

The Jounin sighed, and tried a different approach. "Okay. Fast forward twenty, thirty years. You're the sixth Hokage. You're sitting in your office, doing boring paperwork. A messenger comes in and tells you that there's a squad of missing-nin attacking a village near the border to Takinokuni. What do you do?"

Glare. "You're still trying to trap me."

"I'm trying to -show- you -why- you need to follow my advice, rather than just yelling at you to do what I say."

"Oh." He sat and scowled in thought for a minute, two. "I guess... I go out and stop the missing-nin. I have to - it's my job to protect Konoha, right?" He looked at his teacher's carefully neutral face. "Guess not."

"After you defeat the missing-nin, you return to Konohagakure... and find it in ruins. While you were gone, a demon wolf came out of the wilderness and killed everyone it could find." He paused a moment, then said, as gently as he could, "The point isn't to show you that you need to react one way or another to a given problem - it's to demonstrate that the world is a complicated place that doesn't reward those who rely on simple answers or flawed understandings... and to show that the lives - the hopes, dreams, and loves - of every single person in the Hidden Leaf rely on the Hokage making the right choice."

Naruto looked down and gritted his teeth. "You don't think I'm good enough to be Hokage." _But... he's right. If Konoha needs someone who'll make the right decisions... I'd just jump in, even _I _know that._

"I think you could be."

"Nani?" He looked up, and if his eyes were suspiciously bright, then Neshan carefully failed to notice.

"I mean, yeah, you're hotheaded and rash - now. But you're not near as stupid as you act, so there's nothing stopping you from learning better. From learning everything you'd need to know, if you were willing to put in the effort." A slow, conspiratorial smile. "You don't strike me as someone who's afraid of hard work."

Naruto smiled. "'There are no shortcuts to becoming Hokage,' huh?"

"No. But..." he broke off, then started again, tentatively, "Can I offer some advice? On a personal matter."

"Nani? What are you talking about, Sensei?"

"Your teammates... Tell them about Kyuubi."

The Genin's head snapped up. "But..."

Neshan crouched and laid a hand on each of his student's shoulders. "If you do it now, then you can present it in a way that's favorable to _you_... rather than having an enemy try to turn it into a weapon to blackmail you or break the team with."

"What if they hate me?" His voice was quieter than a whisper.

"Then better to know now, rather than after you've become close to them."

Naruto hesitated, his mind chasing itself around in circles. Those two women watching him as the new academy graduates celebrated around them, and their cold, cold eyes. Sakura's blushing face as he sat next to her on the park bench, wearing Sasuke's form. Sasuke's slow, respectful nod as he volunteered to be the one to test their sensei's defenses - and provoke the heaviest retaliation - to clear the way for the Number One Rookie's attack. "...too late..."

The older boy nodded slowly, drew in a breath through his nose, then let it out in a huff. "All right. Your call." He stood to go. "Keep working on the tree climbing until dusk, then go home and get a good night's rest. I'll try and dig up a tactics manual for you to study by tomorrow morning. Same place, same time."

_Study? Aw, man..._

"So. You and Uchiha, huh?"

**_Hell_ yeah! 'Till the end of time!**

"Yes, Sensei. I know it seems silly of me, but..." She blushed, and changed the subject. "Anyway, you said that you would be speaking to us about individualized training?"

"Uh huh." He took a seat on an outstretched tree root, facing towards her. She sat, also, and composed herself to listen. "Before we start, though, I'd like to plant a little bug in your ear for you to worry over."

"Yes?" _Huh?_

"Uchiha... Uchiha Itachi is one of the five most dangerous missing-nin in the world. Someone out to kill a man like that... What do you think that he'd be more interested in, a pretty face... or a strong kunoichi? An asset or an admirer? A lover... or a partner?" She opened her mouth to reply, and he held up a hand. "No, I don't need to know. It's private, not my business to butt into. Just think on it a few days.

"Anyway," he said next, after leaving her a moment to absorb the thought and set it aside, "Everyone has a natural chakra level, a reserve of power which may be increased by training or decreased by disuse. The vast majority of people, perhaps ninety-nine percent, naturally fall within a fairly narrow range, leaving differentiation mostly a matter of practice and development. Some, like Sasuke, or Naruto in particular, have exceptionally large reserves, allowing them to access more powerful techniques, sooner and with greater safety.

"Others have naturally lower power levels. They are people who have to go through life dealing with the fact that, no matter what they do, they will always tire sooner. That they will always be limited in their choice of techniques. That they will_ always_ lose a battle of attrition. People like me. Or you."

"But, Sensei," she asked, "aren't you a Jounin?"

He nodded. "Yes. But, in terms of jutsu, I'm definitely the weakest one in the village. I achieve my effectiveness by maximizing my own advantages - precision control of my chakra, native intelligence, and a certain variance from the usual viewpoint on most problems - preparing for battle to a degree that most never even consider, and adjusting my battle tactics to either neutralize the enemy's jutsu or prevent them from ever becoming an issue.

"The tactics will work almost as well for -any- combination of abilities, so I'll be teaching them to all three of you. For the rest... your assumptions and background are a lot more conventional than mine, but you don't seem to share my tendency to think strictly in straight lines, which should more than make up the difference. You actually have _more _chakra than I did at your age, your control is also considerably better, and you're at _least _as smart."

She quailed, slightly. "What? But, but, I'm not a genius or anything! Not like Sasuke-kun."

He smiled, and messed up her hair. "Genius is what you make of it, girl." She still didn't look reassured. "So! Sakura, what would you say is your greatest weakness?"

She didn't even have to think about it. "Taijutsu. I'm just not very strong, physically."

"All right." He grinned, as though at some private joke. "When the body is strengthened, its internal chakra flows are increased in turn. If it is trained in a particular _way_, then their _patterns_ are also altered."

She nodded. "I remember. We learned that in the academy."

"Right. What you didn't learn, because the practical considerations make it moot, for most people, is that the reverse is also true. By altering your internal chakra flows, you can alter the function of your own body."

"Ninjutsu, right?"

"Broadly, yes. But a body-alteration ninjutsu is a chakra construct defined and executed in terms of a real body - that is, its internal logic is described by how it alters what is already there. It anchors itself to the natural chakra flows, but it does not actually -change- them. It simply... covers them, and when it is done they are left much as they were."

"Oh."

"When you alter the base flows, in contrast, you are changing the operation of your body - redefining the unchanging constant upon which a ninjutsu would be based. You may increase the strength of your muscles and the resilience of your flesh - or _de_crease them, if you had reason to do so. Instead of using your body to guide a quantity of kinetic chakra, so that you _seem_ stronger, you actually_ become_ so."

"Wow... But," some of his earlier words returned to mind and broke through her awe at the many possibilities unfolding from such an idea. "What did you mean about the 'practical considerations'?"

"The degree of alteration required is extremely subtle. Doing this consistently enough to be useful requires that your control of your chakra be _absolutely perfect_. I'm the only Jounin in the village right now who can do it in meditation, and there's _no one_ who can do it in combat. ANBU can't. Sandaime-sama can't. Ninety-nine out of a hundred medic-nin - whose stock-in-trade_ is_ their chakra control - couldn't, even if they knew to."

Her eyes went very wide. "But... if you're telling me, then..."

He met her gaze - and grinned. "At the usual rate of improvement, five years to use it in a combat situation, or three in training. If you make control a special focus, one year combat, eight months training. If you drop everything else and train intensively, three months to fight... and two weeks to levels useful for training."

"If I can't use it in a real fight, what use is training with it?"

"When control is relaxed and the patterns revert, they don't do so all the way - their default position has been slightly altered in the direction of the enhancement, a little farther each time..."

"...so that each time I trained with altered chakra, I'd be a little stronger when I finished!" She leaned forward and bounced in her seat slightly. "Where do I start?"

"Right, good, you've got this cold. Take a break, recover a bit. Running yourself_ all_ the way out of chakra won't do anything to improve your capacity. Hey Naruto! What'cha need?"

Sakura struggled to pull herself into a vaguely respectable sitting position, rather than just lying on the forest floor like what she felt like - a well beaten rug. She turned her head slightly, ignoring the audible grinding noise coming from inside her neck. "hi naruto..."

Konoha's most hyperactive ninja charged over to his crush's side. "Sakura-chan! What happened!"

Neshan set a hand on his shoulder and pulled him gently away. "Don't worry. She just overdid the training a bit. She'll be fine."

"How did she overdo it," Sasuke asked from the edge of the clearing, "if you were right here?"

"I'm starting her on a different regimen from you two; hers goes faster if you run yourself _almost _all the way down." He leaned forward and murmured, so only Naruto could hear, "i guess you changed your mind?"

"Yeah..."

Sasuke sat facing the three already present, forming a rough circle. "Alright, Dobe. What did you need to talk to us about?"

Naruto looked down at the dirt just in front of his crossed legs, face shadowed and voice entirely serious. "Twelve years ago... the Yondaime Hokage defeated the Kyuubi, the nine-tailed demon fox... But... He didn't kill it."

"what?" Sakura said. "baka. of course he killed it. everyone knows that." **Damn straight!** _...ow... not so loud..._

"No. We kids were all told that it was killed, but it wasn't. It was sealed - locked away inside the bellybutton of a baby."

"If we weren't supposed to be told, how do you know?" Sasuke challenged.

"The final academy test... I failed it, remember? That night... Mizuki-sensei came to me and said that there was a traditional last chance for failing students. If I could get a certain scroll, and bring it to him, then he'd be able to pass me.

"I got it, and... showed it to Iruka-sensei. He said that that scroll... was actually a list of kinjutsu, forbidden techniques. That I'd be in a lot of trouble for taking it. Mizuki-sensei came then. He attacked Iruka-sensei. He wanted me to give him the scroll... Iruka-sensei said that he'd lied to me, to get me to steal the scroll for him. Mizuki-sensei said there was no point in my having the scroll, because... because..." Tears were rolling down his cheeks.

"he said that you were the fox's prison, naruto?" Sakura gave him a weak smile, and laid a comforting hand on his knee. _wow. this is big... who'd've thought that 'that naruto' was hiding something this important._

"No. No, he said that, that I _was_ the fox. That that was why all the adults in the village hated me. That that was why _Iruka-sensei_ really hated me. That that was why... everyone always _would_ hate me."

"Sensei," Sasuke said. "Is this true?"

"It is forbidden," Neshan said slowly, "for any adult to speak of the fate and disposition of the nine-tailed demon fox. But, there is a jutsu which produces a seal of the type described, and to the best of my knowledge it is the only way a being of the Kyuubi's power could be defeated out of the means available to the Fourth Hokage."

Sasuke and Sakura absorbed that for a moment. "oh."

Naruto's hands were fisted around the fabric of his pants, every line of his body screaming tension.

Sasuke snorted. "There is no way that the dead last ninja of our graduating class could be a demon as powerful as that."

Naruto's head snapped up. "Hey!" he yelped - but his eyes glowed.

"baka naruto. you're annoying... but that doesn't make you a monster."

Neshan met Naruto's eyes and mouthed 'I told you so.'

"YO, BRAT!"

Neshan looked up from the array of papers spread across the table in front of him. "There's no need to shout, Anko-sempai. This is a library, after all."

Special Jounin Mitarashi Anko was usually willing to take any chance to tweak a stuffed shirt's nose, but there was no point being vulgar when there was only him around to see it. _He_ got knotted up just because going all provocative stirred up feelings he trusted even less than the rest of his emotions, and that wasn't any fun. So she saved the effort and just flopped across the nearest free chair like some net-covered invertebrate. "Guess what!"

"You're going to flay Hyuuga Hiashi alive and dance through the streets of the village with his head on a spear and feathers in your hair, singing enka at the top of your lungs?"

"Nah. Don't want his blood on me; might be catching." She grinned, then leaned forward, bouncing slightly in her seat. "No, what happened today was... He talked to me!"

"A complete sentence this time, I take it?"

She rapped her knuckles across the crown of his head. "Of course, you twit. We were talkin' about the new batch of Genin. He wanted t' make sure I wasn't gonna eat one'v his precious students."

He chuckled and tucked a slip of scrap paper in the book to mark his place. "Be fair; you _do_ come across as the type."

"Feh. Like they'd let me play shrink if it was true? Let alone _run_ the damned loonie bin?"

"Because of course you're such a terribly modest and retiring person that no one has any problem at all retaining their dispassion and critical thinking skills."

The shot went home harder than it had been meant to, and Anko slumped. "Yeah, maybe you're right. 'S just... why'd it have to be _him_?"

It was his turn to rap _her_ on the head, and he duly leaned forwards and did so. "He was nervous because he didn't know you well enough to know better. Spend some time _talking_ to him rather than stalking from afar and he'll calm down."

"But-"

"Ah-ah!" He interrupted her protest with a raised finger. "Was he as nervous when you were done talking as he was when you started?"

She thought for a moment, then looked relieved. "No. Not nearly."

"Well! There you are, then." He cast about for a subject to change to, before she could start in on her fantasy life - _again_. "Segueing from, how's your team look?"

She gave him a knowing sort of look, but played along. "If yer joking about dead Hyuugas then you know something already."

"Hina-chan, you mean? Yeah, she's a sweetie. Cute as a basket full of kittens. I tried to adopt her a couple of times when her class came here on field trip, give her a place to hide out away where her family couldn't hassle her. It didn't take, though, so there was only so much I could do. I knew you'd gotten her, but not who the rest of the team was."

"Inuzuka and Aburame. Know 'em?"

He nodded. "Vaguely. Kiba's a loudmouth; kinda hard to miss. Shino I've known a while - his big sister was on my Genin team. Quiet kid, obsessive about bugs - even by _his _clan's generous standards."

"Thanks for the tip." She gave a little mock shudder. "I figure to get the boys workin' together to help out 'Hinata-imoto-chan' so's to boost her confidence. Between you'n me, her actual _skills_'re Chuunin grade already - or would be if she didn't flinch nine times outta ten. By the way, you talked to Ibiki yet?"

"Not today, why?"

"He latched onta me about dinnertime - I just pried him loose a couple minutes ago. It _seems_," and here she smirked, with a sort of inner delight at seeing the tables of fate justly turned, "that he's got a girl on his hands with some _real_ interest'n kinks. He gave 'em his usual tour a' the dungeons, and from what he _didn't_ say she was goin' real weak at the knees by the end of it. Wanted me to come up with a psychological excuse not to pass her."

He sniffed. "Surprising he'd see it that way, given what the rumor mill says about _him_. 'Her,' 'her...' he's got this generation's Ino-Shika-Chou, doesn't he?"

"That's them!" she chirped.

"'Her...' Skinny kid, platinum blonde, bossy as they come? Social butterfly type?"

She shrugged. "Dunno. Never met 'er. What about your three?"

"They're the next Legendary Three."

She raised her eyebrows. "No shit?"

He raised his left hand, palm out, and laid his right across his heart. "I shit you not. Sasuke's classic Uchiha across the board, right down to the obsessive tendencies and freakish chakra levels. Naruto, well, you know what I..." His speech dropped off into nothing as a look of dawning realization crossed his face. He grinned and jabbed a pointing finger in Anko's face. "PAY ME, SUCKER!"

Stare. "No way. Nobody's that strong. Nobody _human_."

"You know how this works!" he crowed. "He -is-, -exactly- in time with the seal's decay, -exactly- the same as what's leaking through!"

"But, but... does it gotta be _dango_?" she whined.

He blinked. "'Course not. You know I can't stand the stuff."

She sighed, visibly relieved. "No problem, then. Hey, what about the third?"

"Sakura?" Neshan tucked both hands behind his neck and smiled at the sealing. "She reminds me of me. Only better. Not as self-motivated, no great causes, but a lot more flexible thinker. Trust me," he turned his gaze back to her, and grinned. "They're gonna change the world."

And after that, conversation turned to lighter things, like work and business, and went on into the night.

"That was a week a' lunches, right?"

"A _month_, and you know it, Senpai!"

**TO BE CONTINUED...**

Author's Notes: Well, here you have it, folks: Yet another blatant self-insertion into the world of Naruto. I've tried to be careful to maintain accurate characterization, both of the actual characters and 'myself', and I think I've succeeded. Team 7 and others look like, at the very least, people who could end up seeming like the ones we see in canon, and 'Neshan' is neither particularly funny, lacking in flaws, nor more powerful/skilled/persuasive than might be expected from seventeen years of preparation and training.

See y'all next week, hey?


	2. Change

**TEENAGE GENIN NINJA HEROES**

chapter 2

CHANGE

JUNE, 12TH YEAR AFTER THE ATTACK OF THE KYUUBI

"REEEOOOOOOOOWW!"

"Itai! Itai! Hold _still_, you idiot cat!" Naruto howled, nearly as loudly as his prisoner.

"Don't hold it so roughly!" Sakura scolded. "It won't stop _fighting_ while you're crushing its ribs!"

Sasuke counted his way down the checklist. "Ginger tabby, bow on left ear, tomcat, approximately seventeen pounds. This looks like our target." _And,_ he carefully did not say, _our fifth perfect mission._

"Yep," their Sensei, Neshan, confirmed. "This is Tora, all right. Take a good look; you'll be getting to know him _real_ well."

"He runs away a lot?" Sakura guessed, holding one hand firmly on the back of the cat's neck while supporting his weight by the other arm. **Who'd want him _back_?** her second personality remarked from the security of her subconscious, with a figurative glare at the way the feline was digging his claws into her arm.

Naruto had been nursing the scratches on his face and bite on his hand after being relieved of his infuriated burden, but now he looked up and grinned. "Ano sa, ano sa, does that mean we get a real mission now?"

Neshan felt free to smirk, since he was turned away from the Genin and it couldn't be seen. "By rights, that question should disqualify you..."

"Ehh? No, wait, I understand! Really! We need to-"

"Understand the importance of details in even the most power-intensive fight." His voice, deliberately stern, wavered on the last word.

Naruto didn't notice. "But, Seeeeennnseeeeeiiii!"

The Jounin laughed. "Oh, don't worry. I'm just winding you up. Once we get Tigger here back to Madame Shijimi, you three can knock off 'till noon. Meet me at the usual field; I'll talk to the Third about having a mission for you tomorrow." None of the students bothered to wonder who or what a 'tigger' was. Their sensei was an immigrant to Konoha, and even after spending most of his life there, was still prone to making allusions to the tales and culture of his homeland - regardless of the fact that no one around him had any clue what he was talking about. Eventually, like gnats or mosquitoes, it had simply become something to be accepted.

"YAAHOOOO!" Konoha's Loudest Ninja lived up to his nickname.

* * *

"Well, I'll be damned." 

Sakura was dancing across the center of the turbulent pool under the small waterfall, running through the fifth of the eight academy taijutsu kata at half speed. Despite her movement and shifting weight, and the instability of the surface underneath her, her feet left not even a ripple to mark their passing.

Sasuke was climbing a tree on the opposite bank, walking slowly up with never a wobble or a missed step. Already he was halfway up with nary a scar on the bark, and from the scuffing of the dirt at the tree's base he'd been at it a while.

Naruto was sitting in the grass at the top of the small cliff, with three different, _large _scrolls spread out before him. Neshan recognized the end-caps on the nearest one - the tactical manual he had given to his student.

"Oi, you," came a voice from behind him. "These the super gifted kids you said'd be handling Gatou's thugs?"

"Just so, Tazuna-san. YO! MINIONS!"

splishthumpwhap...flutterflutter... bumpbumpbump At their teacher's shout, all three Genin had abandoned what they were doing and crossed the distance to land if front of him in a single leap.

"Sensei, who's this?" Sakura asked, peering up at the balding, slovenly man in front of her. **Eeeew... if he starts _scratching_, I'll hurl!**

Neshan didn't answer immediately, instead turning to their guest and gesturing towards his students in turn. "Umida-san, these are my students - Haruno Sakura, Uzumaki Naruto, and Uchiha Sasuke. Kids, this is our client for a C-class bodyguard mission to the Wave Country. His name is Umida Tazuna."

"Yosh'!" Naruto cheered, giving a thumbs up. "Don't you worry about a thing, Pops! Nobody's gonna touch you while _I'm_ around!"

"Hmph. I oughta go back and ask for a team without a super loudmouthed idiot on it."

"What! Hey, you! Don't you think tha-MPH!" Sakura grabbed him into a one-armed headlock and clapped the other hand firmly over her teammate's mouth. Even without accounting for his crush on her, Naruto knew that - with the taijutsu training she'd been doing since graduation - he had no chance of winning a grappling match unless she _let_ him do so. He crossed his arms and subsided in bad grace.

Neshan smiled benignly over the scene. "Considering your failure to provide accurate information, I think that we're actually being quite generous."

Sasuke cocked an eyebrow, and Sakura let her hand fall away from Naruto's face as both of them stared on with identical expressions of shock.

Tazuna froze, for a moment, then slumped defeatedly. "You know...?"

"Quite a bit more than you, I think. But, under the circumstances, your credit is good, and the interest on the balance of your payment quite reasonable."

The architect closed his eyes and sighed. "Heh. Well, I guess that's the best I could hope for in this super-bad situation."

"Right, so. If you're amenable to departing in, say, two hours, then we can let the kids get home and pack, right?"

"Two hours, right." And he turned and walked away, head, for once, held high.

"Sensei..." Sakura said, standing away from her shorter compatriot. "What you said... this is a _B-CLASS_ mission!" **Damn it! Is he trying to _kill_ us!**

He nodded, slowly. "Almost certainly. However... As a Tokubetsu Jounin, I am prohibited from spending extended periods of time away from the village. This will be the only high-level mission I'll be able to take with you. This will be my _only_ opportunity to... show you what I want to teach you. The greater dangers... I believe that they'll help to teach you more than you'd otherwise be able to learn." He adjusted his glasses and looked at them seriously. "And your performance in your training has been beyond my wildest expectations. In terms of pure combat ability... all three of you are already Chuunin level."

"But not in other ways," Naruto said, disappointed.

Neshan laid a hand on his shoulder. "You've all three of you got some growing up to do. You _coul_d do it right away, if you had to - but there's no reason you should. You're better off waiting - it'll be healthier in the long run."

"I'm not a child," he snarled.

"If you need to say that - you are. For now." He tapped Naruto on the side of the chin, forcing the smaller boy to meet his gaze directly. "Don't be in such a hurry. Most of the time, adulthood sucks. You work, you worry, you suffer... For every restriction you lose from outside, you gain three more inside your head. The more careful you are about this - the more groundwork you lay now - the smaller the real price you'll have to pay later."

"Price?" Sakura asked, hovering uncertainly on the edges of their conversation.

"Everything has a cost, kid. Maturity's is paid in pain. Now go on. Clock's running."

* * *

"MOOOOOM!" Sakura yelled, head buried in her closet.

"What!" came the muffled reply from downstairs.

"WHERE'S MY FIRE KIT?"

"You used it! Replacement's with the groceries!"

"THANKS!"

Fire kit, rations, weapons, medical kit, bandages, more weapons, drug kit, toiletries...

"Aaaaannd a change of clothes!" she said triumphantly, pulling something from amid the shoulder-high mountain of cloth and letting it unfurl to reveal...

A bright green leotard. "Ugh. Not that."

A bra - one of her mother's, which must've gotten mixed in with her laundry. No telling how long ago, given _her_ room. "Not yet, dammit."

A bikini top with noticeably less fabric than the previous item. blush "Um, no."

Her best friend snickered. "Not until it's too small for you, anyway."

"Bite me, Ino-buta." It was so _nice _to be friends with Ino again! Granted, she'd have been just as glad to be spared Anko-sensei's chosen means of forcing them to make up - she _still _couldn't get the sulfur stink out of what _had_ been her favorite pair of sandals - but if that was the only thing she lost getting her sister-in-arms back, then she'd count it as cheap at twice the price.

"Why are you even bothering, anyway, Odeko-chan? You know you'll just end up taking another of those tacky red dresses." To hear Ino tell _her_ version of the leadup to that entirely-too-memorable night, involving the obnoxious Special Jounin in the conspiracy to rescue their friendship actually hadn't been Neshan-sensei's idea... which was kind of startling when you considered that he was basically the psycho-woman's best friend.

"They are _not_ tacky!" She whirled, hands going to her hips, then tossed her head, flipping her braid back over her shoulder. "Besides, I lost my last clean one."

The third person in the room decided to calm things down before the other two started one of their fights - again. "How on earth do you find _anything_ in here, anyway?" Tenten asked. _That_ friendship, though, _was_ her teacher's fault. He had taken her to a man he had called 'the Leaf's greatest Taijutsu specialist' to learn what he had described as the perfected variant of the basic hand-to-hand forms that she - along with all the other students in her year - had been taught in the academy.

Whatever she had been expecting, a thirty year old man with a spandex fetish and eyebrows that could have doubled for bottle-brushes was _not_ it. That would have been enough of a disappointment, but the apparition had gone on to cement the impression of complete and pathetic insanity by introducing himself as 'That Friend of Youth and educator of fertile young minds, Konoha's Beautiful Green Beast - Maitooooooo GAI!'

Despite his talk of being an educator, though, it had taken Tenten's intervention - spurred by Neshan's offer to teach her the deceptively subtle jutsu he used to give his thrown weapons such force of impact - to convince Gai to polish Sakura's taijutsu techniques.

Tenten had looked at the kunai Neshan had buried most of its own length into the living wood of the large tree at the center of the clearing where Team Gai had been practicing, then walked, head bowed, over to stand in front of her instructor. When she looked up, unshed tears had glimmered across the corners of her eyes. 'If you say no,' she had said, voice trembling, 'I'll cry.'

Gai had refused at first, saying that 'The splendor of her shining youth would be smirched were I to interfere so with her education! By forging its _own_ path to greatness, her star will shine far brighter!'

Tenten had sniffled.

That had been enough - almost - to drop the eccentric Jounin into a panic. 'Tenten! Be strong! The glittering shine of-'

- the single tear breaking free and rolling down Tenten's cheek. Gai had collapsed to his knees, blubbering apologies as he gave his permission, and no one present had really had cause to regret it since. In the end, the two girls had even accounted the greatest benefit as being, not the improvements to their skills, but their new friend.

Sakura crossed her arms, bikini still dangling from one hand. "It's not as disorganized as it looks," she sniffed.

"No," Ino wisecracked. "It's worse."

Tenten snickered. "That's possible?"

The pink-haired girl fumed for a moment, then dropped the bikini, grabbed the nearest throwable object... and ducked, eyes going wide. fwipTHWAK "Eep!"

The oldest girl froze in place, staring at the object her kunai had impaled against the corkboard over the desk. Sakura turned to look at it, then stared also.

"BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" Ino fell over laughing as Sakura blushed and started frantically trying to pry the kunai out and close the book - or at least turn it to a less embarrassing - and less dog-eared - page.

Tenten sat there in horror for a moment longer, then tried to apologize - tried, since the effort kept getting tangled up with the twin urges to laugh at the sheer absurdity of the situation and lock up in tongue-tied mortification at exactly _which_ of that notorious book's pages had been showing. In the end, she did none of them. "Ano... _Icha Icha Paradise_!"

Sakura finally pulled the blade free with a pop - it had gone straight through, all the way into the wall. "you'd think i'd know better than to throw things at you by now... Rrg. My brother's a jerk."

"That wasn't a page a _guy_ would turn to, Odeko-chaaaAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" Ino smirked at the opportunity to deliver a well-deserved zinger onto her best friend, but the other girl's squinting glare had been the final straw needed to shatter her hard-won control and send her spiraling back into helpless laughter.

"Grrrr." Sakura took a short step over the tangled pile of knitting supplies wrapped halfway around the desk chair's back leg, then a long one over the shallow mound of dirty clothes on top of her favorite Go board, then a second short one to balance on top of the heavy staff braced over her stereo and three different piles of scolls by the base of her bed and the surface of the desk. Both of the other girls had been sitting on the bed, since it was by far the largest clear space in the room, and Tenten casually reached out a leg and tripped the younger kunoichi before she could lock her hands around her helpless best friend's throat.

"Ne, ne, Sakura? You can drop by my house on your way out of town and borrow one of my outfits - you really don't have much more time to look, you know."

"Really?" she said, voice badly muffled by the mattress.

"Really-really," Tenten confirmed with a smile.

* * *

As passers-by went, he was as unremarkable as they came. Average height, average build, brown eyes and shortish hair-colored hair. Respectably but not flashily dressed, his age was in that indeterminate zone between the late twenties and the early forties, and he moved down the street with the determined stride of a definite Type A traveler.

A slightly drunken gaggle of giggling kawaii passed him on the other side of the street, going the opposite direction. The words 'Uchiha' and 'whipped cream' could be heard drifting up faintly out of the center of the cluster of a dozen or so girls.

The anonymous man shuddered slightly.

Conventional wisdom said that most kunoichi were best suited to act as Genjutsu specialists, and that most Genjutsu users were likewise female. The precise reasoning behind this conclusion varied, of course, but generally ran to the effect of the aptitude being a result - or cause - of female ninjas' more deceptive, manipulative natures. As opposed to the aggressive, combative nature of their male counterparts, of course.

The kindest thing Neshan-sensei had had to say about that line of thought was 'Bunk!'

And the development of Team Seven seemed to have borne his thought out. Naruto's tactics had gone from childishly simple to _deceptively_ simple, and were well backed by a growing array of quick-acting but power-intensive ninjutsu. Even the short month since the formation of their team had given Sakura the time to begin to explore the wealth of strategies opened up by ever-increasing taijutsu skills... and the exceptional strength and speed that had led to their creation.

And Sasuke - possessing both an observant and detail-oriented mind and the deep chakra reserves necessary to shape the truly dangerous high-level genjutsu - was well on his way to trading in his title to become Konoha's Number One _Genin_.

The anonymous man smiled, and hitched his pack higher on his shoulder.

He had to meet his team.

* * *

Nightcap, pajamas.

The Gatou syndicate was primarily a trading concern. It moved about a quarter of the cargo on the Mist Sea, and 98 of that going to the Wave Country.

Kunai, shuriken, Fuuma Shuriken.

Since the Whitefish Guild had gone out of business - leaving Gatou with its current monopoly - the Gross National Product of the Wave Country had dropped by more than a third. Most of Gatou's profits from its control of the Wave trade stemmed from its ability to offer lower wages in the now-destitute Wave than it would in more affluent nations. By locating the majority of its construction and refit yards in the Wave Country, the Gatou Group could cut its operating expenses considerably.

Ramen, firestarter.

While the Wave Country was made up of a large number of individual islands, the straits between them were narrow enough to be easily crossed by ferry - even the broadest would take only an hour or two. In contrast, the trip from the islands to the mainland required most of a day.

First aid kit, canteen.

When it was finished, the causeway currently under construction would be the largest bridge of any type anywhere in the world. More relevantly, it would allow anyone with a cart or steam-truck access to the Wave, not only reversing the depression brought on by the Gatou Group's high freight rates but probably as much as doubling the Wave's GNP.

Spare jacket, more ramen.

With that much of an improvement in local industry, wages would rise - massively. The Wave's exports of exotic woods and marine delicacies would drive the economy until its standard of living became one of the highest in the world. The Gatou Group's profit margin, when deprived of cheap labor in the Wave Country, would take a massive hit - a fifty percent reduction at the very least, probably more.

Toothbrush, toothpaste.

The head of the Gatou Group, a man by the same name, was known for being both aggressive and utterly ruthless. He had no respect for the laws of the countries in which he operated, much less anything as empherial as 'morals'. With the wealth of his company available for the purpose, it was well within both his means and his character to hire legal ninja or nukenin to assassinate the driving force behind the construction of the mainland bridge - Umida Tazuna.

Bedroll, Gama-chan.

At some point in the future, he would definitely be asked to take missions of equal or higher rating - B, A, or even S class missions so dangerous that they were given only to volunteers - but even if he did, he would never again have to do so with so little preparation. When that day came, his skills would be far in advance of those he currently possessed, and his ability to meet the challenges of those missions likewise improved.

This combination of danger and weakness would not, _could_ not be repeated - his life would never be more at risk than it was now.

"Yosh'!" Naruto declared, tying the straps of his backpack closed. "I'll make you proud, Sensei!" And, with a bang and a flourish, he closed and locked his apartment's door behind him, then turned and started off towards the village's gate.

"N-Naruto-kun?"

"Eh?" He turned and looked down slightly. A girl, about his age, dark blue hair, pure white eyes - not blank like if she was blind, but _white_, iris and pupil both. The bulky fur-edged jacket and faint blush tickled at his memory. "Ahhh... Hinata-chan, right?"

She jerked, slightly, as though struck lightly. "H-hai! Hyuuga Hinata."

Was she afraid he'd hurt her? "Right, I remember! From the Academy! You were right after Sasuke in Taijutsu!"

She smiled, slightly, and the blush got noticeably deeper. "H-hai. A-a-ano... I was wondering..." she trailed off and started to nibble at the first knuckle of her right hand.

Huh? "Ne, ne, wondering what?" he prompted.

"I was w-wondering if... if you'd..." She swallowed hard and took a deep breath, then bowed her head and blurted, "ifyoudliketoeatlunchwithme!" Then she froze, and her face was the color of a beet as she bit her bottom lip unconsciously.

She... wanted to eat lunch... with _him_? That meant... that meant...

That meant she wanted to be friends!

He put a hand behind his head and laughed sheepishly. Now of all times! "Eheheh... Sorry, Hinata-chan, but I can't." She slumped visibly. "Demo, demo! When I get back from my mission I can take you to Ichiraku!"

Her face positively_ lit _up, and he could have sworn he saw the wilted blooms in Mrs. Yamada's flowerbox perk up and start to glow with health. _Wow,_ he realized. _Hinata-chan's actually kind of pretty._

"Hai!" She bowed, abruptly. "It's a da- a deal!"

He grinned and waved over his shoulder as he bolted off. "Great! See ya then!"

Hyuuga Hinata smiled softly as she watched her crush rush off towards Konohagakure's main gate. _Naruto-kun... kakkoi..._

"So? Wha'd I tell ya?"

The shy Genin jumped slightly, and turned to face the one who had addressed her. _Why _did she insist on popping out of nowhere like that? "H-hai, Anko-sensei. He... I..." She lunged forward and latched on to the older woman with a fierce hug. "Thank you!"

Anko rocked back on her heels from the impact, and stared down at the blue-tinged head of hair buried against her chest for a moment. Then she smiled, more softly than anyone save her closest friends would have given her credit for, and wrapped her arms gently around her student's shoulders. "You're welcome." After a moment, she tugged at Hinata's shoulders and held her at arm's length. "So! With that done, all that's left for today is to get you set up for tomorrow's mission!"

"N-no." Hinata shook her head sharply. "I-I need to talk to... before my courage runs out. Please, Sensei, where does Team Six train?"

_This is too fast. When he rejects her, we'll have lost everything we've made so far._ But how to dissuade her without doing the damage herself? Maybe if she-

"I know that you don't think it's a good idea to... to do this this soon," the girl interrupted her thoughts. "Demo... If I go any farther thinking that... that he really thinks of himself as my cousin... and I'm _wrong_, then... It'll all be undermined when I find out. Better... better to know now, and only have to, to build myself once." She gave a shy little smile. "Besides, I'm used... to cold family."

_I see,_ Anko closed her eyes and shook her head. _I underestimated her. _"The place you want is a small clearing, about half a mile behind Field Two. Look for the big oak."

Hinata bowed again. "Arigatou!"

* * *

shKRAK Hit. **shKRAK** Hit. **shKRAK** Miss.

Yamanaka Ino curled the whip back up into a single coil with a deft twist of the wrist and gave a huff of irritation as she glared at the last of the small clay bottles sitting on the irregularly spaced bamboo poles in the center of the clearing. "Sensei," she said, "Why do I have to use _this_ silly thing-" She brandished the whip at him. "-rather than a real weapon?"

"Coming from the person you want to be, it is silly," Morino Ibiki agreed, with a smile that tugged oddly at the slashing scar running across his face. "Coming from the person you _are_, though, it'll fit exactly with what your opponents expect... and exactly what they're afraid of."

She blushed. "But, that's..."

"Feh. Just give it up. Your princess act is so troublesome - especially when it doesn't work." Nara Shikamaru had already run through his chakra reserves with their earlier group training, and Ibiki had let him take an hour or so to recover before starting on his taijutsu. He lay flat on his back, staring at the cloudy sky overhead, and didn't even turn his head to look at his teammate as he spoke.

"Shi. Ka. Ma. Ruuuu..." Ino snarled as she turned to loom over him. "Maybe -you- think that-"

"Enough," Ibiki broke in. "Ino. Shikamaru. A ninja can't afford self deception, and he can't afford to alienate his teammates." He turned his head slightly, addressing Shikamaru. "Break's over. Go help Chouji with his tree-climbing. Ino, leave the whip for now and switch to the needles."

Both Genin growled and went to obey, and Ibiki took a moment to rub at the scar where his headache was concentrating most. _Yare, yare. What a team. None of the three of them are that bad alone, but put them together and... What did I do to deserve this?_ He paused a moment, reviewing the last month of his professional life. _Don't answer that._

"Oi, Chouji," Shikamaru was saying as he walked over to the pair. "If you can't move the patch quick enough, try wrapping it all the way around, so that a part of it is always gripping without your having to move it."

"Demo, Shikamaru, that means I'd have to hold two different jutsu at the same time," the bulky Genin objected.

"Yes," Ibiki said, interrupting, "but you'd have to learn that before you'd be ready to try for Chuunin anyway. Now's a very good time to start."

"Hmph. Alright. But this new barbeque place had better be worth it!"

The Jounin chuckled. "I've heard nothing but good things. Shikamaru, come on."

"Hai, hai..."

* * *

'Dear Mrs. Chin... I regret to inform you that following the full investigation of the incident detailed in my last letter to you, y-' There was a slight flicker as the letter was snatched out from in front of him.

"What'cha doin'?"

Umino Iruka looked up, then sighed. Devilish grin, tan trenchcoat thrown over the visitor's chair behind her, net shirt, _very_ nice breasts... He jerked his gaze to the side. _I wish she wouldn't _lean forwards_ like that. _"Ohayo, Anko-sama."

She leaned back slightly, turning to put her perch on the edge of his desk into a more natural posture (and, to his heart rate's consternation, putting her figure above the waist into a perfect profile) and squinted at the sheet of paper in her hand. "Chin, huh? What, ya tossing him out? Nothing's wrong with the kid."

He made a futile grab for the letter. "No, not really. But with the evidence I have, I can't punish the one really responsible. I've put in a recommendation that Hokage-sama sponsor him for re-admission, but I don't have the authority to do anything else."

She jerked it out of his reach, then sniffed and tossed it on his blotter. "Yer taking these rules too seriously. I mean, what's more important - some ink on a page somewhere or a kid losin' his dream?"

"The child, of course." He sighed and smoothed out the new wrinkles in the letter as she started to rummage through the pile of graded papers sitting to one side. "But there's other things involved, too. These same rules prevent a student from being unfairly dismissed if he offends a teacher, or another one being improperly protected after misbehavior. The fact that this time they're being abused doesn't negate that net value, or make the confidence it gives the students' parents any less vital."

She snorted and started to fold one of the reports, origami style. "A rule ain't a law, and this's why: if it gets in the way of the right thing, then it _should _be ignored. I've had both'a these kids into my office - there's no good that can come of letting some sneering little bully hide behind the letter of the law."

"If he's smart enough to do it, then I can't dismiss him," Iruka said, and his face was very cold. "I _shouldn't _dismiss him. This academy isn't here to raise good people. It's here to _train ninja_, and that kind of cunning is a trait that very much suits one."

There was a long, tense silence, and she set the completed paper snake on top of the stack of reports and gave him the oddest look, like equal parts shock, horror, and awe, all mixed in with a little bit of fear. When she spoke, her voice was quiet and subdued, and she did not meet his eyes. "You're right. It's just that..."

He sighed, and nodded. "They're just kids." A beat. "Anyway, was there something you needed?"

Anko shook off the funk and smiled, warmly for once, rather than edged and manic like usual. "Team Eight's doing well."

"Oh?" He perked up and leaned forward. "Tell me?"

* * *

"Tazuna-san, please," Neshan said as they walked side by side through downtown Konohagakure. "Our ability to help you is in direct proportion to your willingness to cooperate with us."

The slovenly architect snorted. "I'm willing. I just don't see why you'd need me to go over all this since you know everything already."

The Jounin hitched his pack up higher on his shoulder and shook his head. "We know _some_, and can guess more from that, but any new information is useful, even if all it is is the fact that two different sources agree on a given point."

"Huh." Tazuna scowled for a moment, then looked over. "I don't know if he's hired any regular ninja. If he has, he does most of his business in the Water Country, so they'll probably be from there."

Neshan nodded.

"I think he's got about four or five missing-nin on the payroll. I've only ever seen two, but rumors give consistent descriptions of three more. There're four men from the Mist, and one woman from the Leaf. Two of the men always work together; those're the ones I saw. Black hair, in their twenties, wear these heavy clawed gauntlets. The other two men are supposed together - I think one works for the other - but sometimes show up alone. One's a kid, black hair, long, wears a mask. Younger than you, older than your students. Other's a man, maybe thirty. Bandaged face, tall, carries a huge, cleaver-sword thing about as long as he is." He took a deep breath. "They're supposed to be dangerous - super ruthless - but the woman is worse. Tall-to-average, super skinny, weird colored hair, lots of scars, and eyes that don't match each other or look like anything human. If she's killed half the people she's supposed to've, in a quarter the ways, and if they're only an eighth as bad as they're supposed to be, then she's a super horrible blood-drinking monster worse than anything you ever saw in a history book or head in a legend."

"You believe it," the younger man said quietly.

"I had a friend that said he'd seen her - super reliable man, never told a lie in his life. He said every word of the rumors was true, and I've never once seem a man look so super scared." He gave his escort a sidelong glance. "You sure you can help?"

"My kids can do this," the other said firmly, repeating the statement softly under his breath as they came to the gate.

"My kids can do this."

As they came to a halt, Neshan nodded to himself and looked his students over. Sakura was standing on the balls of her feet with her fingers interlaced behind her, rocking back and forth slightly as they waited for Naruto. She was dressed much as she usually was these days - short, sleeveless burgundy dress with the Haruno clan crest on the back, tight, stretchy shorts underneath for modesty, sandals, and white linen bandages wound tightly around fingers, palms, wrists and forearms to provide an additional measure of bracing during punches and blocks. She had followed his example and braided her hair to keep it out of the way, and had let the loose plait tuck itself under her backpack as she glanced around with a happy smile. Alert, eager, ready. Good.

Sasuke had been the first to arrive, and had dropped his pack while he waited. He was sitting with his back against it, totally relaxed - but he was positioned for the best possible field of view, and his eyes never stopped moving. Conserving energy, but not taking his principal's safety for granted, even at the heart of friendly territory. Good.

taptaptapTAPTAPTAPskssssshhhhhh

"Hello, Naruto," he said mildly, with a slight lift of one eyebrow.

The Genin flinched, even as he bent over with his hands on his knees, panting. "Eheheh... Hinata-chan wanted to talk to me... and I'm not _that_ late!"

"All right." He gave a quiet snort, then nodded slowly. "Tazuna-san, We're ready whenever you are."

* * *

A warm, sunny day was not the best circumstance under which to pay honors to one's deceased. Nevertheless, he kneeled before the simple monument at the edge of the field, and lay a single bluebonnet at its feet. The flower had been his sister's favorite.

"Ohayo, 'Neesan.

"My Genin team has been doing well since graduation. Anko-sensei has asked Kiba and I to try to support Hinata, by praising her successes and helping her find ways to avoid repeating her failures. Oddly, Kiba has had considerably more success at this than I; perhaps an artifact of dogs' social nature and the Inuzuka clan's association with them.

"Overall, I believe that our efforts are bearing fruit. While Hinata continues to stutter, and remains extremely shy and retiring, her ability to operate under pressure has been improving steadily, and she has slowly begun to begin to offer opinions and anecdotes of her own, rather than simply watching while Kiba and I converse.

"Anko-sensei's order that we attempt to teach the others our family taijutsu styles has been particularly effective. Aburame-ryuu's emphasis on avoiding hard impacts and body blows seems to adapt quite well against the Jyuuken's frequent repetition, but is less suited to defeating the Inuzuka clan's grappling techniques. Conversely, however, Kiba has found that placing oneself in any sort of close lock with a member of the Hyuuga clan is tantamount to suicide - while the formal Jyuuken only generates offense from the tenketsu of the fingers and hands, a few moment's concentration can do the same from any part of the body.

"While in the academy, I had always believed that Hinata's grades from our taijutsu instructors was a form of favoritism, brought on by her family's political influence. As the case actually turns out, this was unfair to both her, and our instructors. While she remains unacceptably tentative in actual sparring, I believe that everyone else on the team has been at least as surprised as I was by the level of insight and instructional ability she has shown in _all_ forms of hand to hand combat, not just her own preferred Jyuuken style.

"Anko-sensei's comments on the causes and treatment of emotional abuse suggest that healing from it is essentially a matter of willpower - and the more I come to know Hinata, the less credible I find the idea of her ever failing in that respect." He sighed quietly, and settled back from kneeling into full seiza.

"Kiba has successfully mastered most of his clan's hereditary ninjutsu, but is unable to deploy them without the aid of soldier pills. Anko-sensei says that this will continue to be the case for at least the next few months, as the Inuzuka techniques are all B ranked by reason of chakra consumption. Nevertheless, she has had him performing a number of control and stamina exercises in an effort to decrease his reliance on what she calls 'unreliable crutches.'

"More generally, I have found that while my initial evaluation of him as being recklessly aggressive and short-tempered is frequently accurate, it is by no means complete. His fearless and arrogant mannerisms cover a considerable degree of observational skill, perhaps even greater than my own. While I have never seen him fail to approach a task within his abilities with ostentatious confidence, he has also proven to have an extremely accurate idea of his own limits, and how they compare to his opponent's.

"For myself, I-" he broke off and looked towards the clearing's entrance as his kikai reported a familiar scent. "Ohaiyo, Kabuto-oniisan."

"Ohaiyo, Shino-kun." There was silence for a moment as the older Genin knelt and made his own offering.

"Neshan-oniisan is not here," Shino observed eventually - although, as usual, there was little to indicate what he thought about the fact.

"He's on a mission." No more than that was needed, not when all concerned, - speaker, spoken-to, spoken-of and departed - were shinobi, and subject to the same code and expectations. They understood about duty, and so did not need to speak further.

An early cicada rasped. Shino, whether prompted by the insect or some aspect of his own character, shifted slightly and asked, "When they... told us what had happened... everything came from Neshan's report. I realize that you probably do not wish to speak of it, but... it would be... comforting to have even a little clearer idea what happened."

Kabuto was quiet for a long moment, and the younger boy heard a reply in the silence, and so breathed a pained sigh and shifted, preparing to stand and go.

"The client had said that there would be no ninja."

Shino was confused for a moment, but then he understood and composed himself to listen.

"The target and the client were both major merchants, and the first owed the second quite a bit of money. We ha been retained to capture the target and obtain from him the location of sufficient properties and accounts to pay his debt - or as close to it as his means allowed.

"As far as we knew going in, the target was alone in his estate except for about two dozen guards and the night's paid entertainment. So, we used our standard formation for non-ninja targets - Neshan in front to draw their fire and attention, then me close behind to cover him, then your sister some distance back with her kikai spread as a warning net, and to allow her to direct us to targets we would otherwise have missed.

"There were twenty-five guards, as advertised, but they were expecting us. That night's courtesan was a Cloud kunoichi, and the rest of her team had infiltrated themselves among the guards.

"Standard procedure for an operation of the type that we _thought_ we were facing is to secure the target first, then neutralize his protectors after it has been assured that he can no longer escape.

"When we entered the target's bedchamber, the Cloud-nin hit Neshan with a genjutsu that had him almost unconscious - I interrupted her before she could finish him, but I wasn't strong enough to defeat her quickly."

Shino became very still at what his kikai were smelling.

"I knew that the other Cloud-nin were attacking her - I could hear them fighting - but until Neshan recovered I could only hope she'd be able to hold out long enough."

"She couldn't," Shino said, voice thick.

"But she took both of them with her," Kabuto answered, with a kind of sad pride that Shino could only understand now that he was with his own Genin cell.

There was peace for a moment, and then the very birds in the trees went deathly silent with the tension as the younger asked the elder, "Why did you lie?"

Kikai exploded from their hive clusters deep in his body to race back and forth across the channels just beneath his skin, trying to be ready for the threat they felt. Despite the unsettling sensation, Shino held very still - he was quickly realizing just how unwise it would be for him to provoke the coldly calculating mind behind what had, until just a moment ago, been the calmest of eyes.

The lethal Jounin that seemed to have swapped into his surrogate brother's skin cocked his head. "Your kikai smelled the involuntary variations in my scent."

"Yes."

And then Kabuto blinked, and was simply a kind, brotherly medic-nin once more. "Because many people would be hurt, if what I'm hiding gets out."

And the kikai smelled that it was the truth.

"If it were only me, I'd have done whatever it took to help her."

And that was also the truth.

"But, under the circumstances, I had - and have - a responsibility to my family... even if it risks my teammates."

Truth.

"And they knew and accepted that."

Truth.

That was all that Shino needed or wanted, but he also had a duty. "Is your secret a threat to Konoha?"

"Not if I have anything to say about it."

Truth.

Kabuto hesitated, then: "For what it's worth... I'm sorry."

"So am I."

It did not occur to Shino until much later - and much too late - that Kabuto had not actually said 'no.'

* * *

He didn't need the Byakugan to practice strikes, and so didn't see her coming out of the forest behind him. Nevertheless, she knew that the quiet sounds of her stride and the subtle feel of her chakra told him of her presence even before she spoke.

"Neji-niisan?"

"Hinata-sama." He turned to look at her, and his voice and face were calm - but an unspoken chill and the tension around the corners of his eyes set her heart sinking in her chest.

"I..." she paused, then plunged ahead. "The Hyuuga clan... _needs_ to change. When, when we left the Lightning Country, the two-family system... stopped being necessary. The longer we keep it, the more harm it does, pain it causes. I... I'll be the clan head, but... I won't be able to change things without at least one ally in the Branch family. If, if you want your children to be free of the Caged Bird seal, then... I know that you've... been hurt. I know that, that you probably hate me. I know you have a right to. But..."

He looked at her as she trailed off, and his face was very cold, indeed. "You know nothing. I don't know why you even feel the need to try, but _no one_ can alter destiny's decrees, let alone someone with your fate of weakness and cowardice. The heavens have appointed the Hyuuga's fate of suffering and hatred, and neither of us can hope to alter it... any more than _you_ could hope to defeat me." Something red-fanged and shadowy seemed to stalk in the echoes between his last words.

"You're wrong, Neji-niisan. People... _I_... _can_ change. I will. I _have_. And I will prove it to you, if you'll only... give me the chance."

"As a member of the Branch House of the Hyuuga, it is my duty to aid and educate the heir, and try to keep her from folly." His face, somehow, grew even colder as he crouched slightly and brought his hands up into the first of the Jyuuken's five stances. "If you want to break free of your loser's fate, then it's better you see the truth at my hands than those of harsh reality."

Her eyes widened at his implicit threat, but then she matched his stance. "Then it is my duty as Heir, to guide and protect those who have lost their way, and forgotten what it means to be family."

He flinched, and paled, enough to be noticeable to normal eyes rather than just Byakugan. Then his lips pulled back in vicious snarl. "A CAGED BIRD HAS NO FAMILY!"

His rage nearly cost him the fight as she slipped outside of his leading right hand, and though he managed to avoid the strike that would have slammed across the side of his head and sent him out for the count with a five-day migraine - if he was lucky - the twist of his body and the momentum of his charge left him completely unable to avoid her outstretched leg. He tried to recover - twisted, failed, fell, crashing to the ground with all his weight and speed grinding his left arm across the ground. When he rose and spun towards her - just in time to block her kick - a seeping mass of blood was spreading over a patch of stripped skin and embedded dirt from wrist to elbow.

She backed off a step, then came in again, leading with her left arm. With his damaged like that, immobilizing his right arm would give her a serious advantage - and did, as the locked limbs twisted off to one side and let her naturally rotate her body in closer for a strike against...

The bleeding on his left arm was even more superficial than it looked, and that hand flashed in a long flurry of strikes that scattered pinpricks of fire across her entire right arm. Her palm strike still broke his nose, but the blue flare that would have marked a proper hit was completely absent.

She twisted the other arm around his and slapped her palm against his shoulder. He flinched, and recoiled, leaving them almost at arms' length. His attack had been typical Hyuuga work, precise and deceptively effective, sealing her tenketsu, the external opening points that let her vent chakra for the Jyuuken's strikes - or redistribute her body's energy to operate the limb's muscles. Her strike, on the other hand, had turned her greatest problem into a strength.

The Hyuuga's reputation and the effectiveness of their Gentle Fist taijutsu style concealed a serious weakness - the same genes that passed on the Byakugan were closely, perhaps inextricably linked with an unusually low natural chakra capacity. While the lesser flow made precise control easier, many Hyuuga Genin had to struggle to muster the power for more than a Bunshin or two, and only a rare handful would ever improve enough to be able to perform more than a single Kaiten before collapsing in exhaustion. A large part of Neji's reputation as a genius was due to the fact that his chakra reserves were actually quite normal - a trait inherited from his mother.

Hinata, however, despite being his cousin from _both_ sides of her parentage, was a sport, an individual in whom the collision of random, otherwise ordinary genes had produced an effect entirely different from the usual. Where other Hyuuga could direct their chakra with instinctive, casual precision, she struggled. Where they seethed, she grieved.

And where her kin husbanded the contents of a meager pool of power, and even Neji worked from a simple mountain lake, she held back a sea fit to rival any genius of the Uchiha or Sarutobi.

That simple slap had delivered far more chakra than Neji's system was prepared to channel, and the effect was much like that of a lightning strike on an open power grid. His body would heal the damage eventually, in a few weeks alone or days with the right medical assistance, but in the meantime that shoulder would be useless, and likewise the arm beneath it.

His working arm struck, once, twice, three times before she blocked the fourth and grabbed his wrist as he pulled back. For a long, painful moment she felt her heart stop in her chest before fear kicked it back into operation and set it hammering against her ribs.

Then she jumped - bracing herself against his wrist and shoulder - and brought her knees up against her chest. His eyes widened.

She wasn't able to put very much chakra into the kick that sent him staggering back and threw her out and away in a long, low flip, but what she _could_ do was enough to double him over, retching helplessly as she landed and looked up and across the small clearing at him.

He spat, sending a spatter of the blood flowing down his face and chin arcing out into the lush grass. "You can't _do_ that! A stupid little pampered flower can't be that strong!"

"N-not if it's cut every time it tries to grow... but Anko-sensei's finally given me a chance."

"You haven-ack!" He doubled over and collapsed to his knees in mid-word, hacking blood free from the passages of his lungs.

She raised a hand, as though to offer assistance. "Neji-niisan... Why are you so angry with me?"

He coughed one last time and snarled at her. "Why? You have the nerve to ask? I thought you were different. I thought you were better than them. And instead, you play politics and power games, twisting everything you can reach." He planted one foot underneath himself and lunged upright, good arm leading. "You're just like the rest."

She flinched, fell back one step, two. "I-i-i... No! It's n-n-not-"

"SHUT UP!" he roared, lunging half the distance between them before pulling up and visibly forcing himself back to some semblance of control. "I don't see any more point to this. Hinata-sama."

"B-but-"

"If you're going to accept a fate as just another manipulative little bitch," he snarled, overriding her quiet words, "you'll need to do something about that stutter."

She flinched, but when he turned to go she managed to force a word out. "WAIT!" He stopped, but did not turn, so she walked around in front of him. "Not even the clan head can change the Hyuuga alone, Neji-niisan. I need your help to do what we both want to happen. And if you won't believe me... then I'll have to start by finding a way to convince you. I _am_ telling the truth, whatever you're afraid of. All I ask is that you tell me how to prove it."

He snorted and stormed past her.

Once she felt his chakra signature leave her senses, Hinata collapsed down to her knees and looked up to the sky with a quiet, plaintive little wail. "I said... to _him_...?"

TO BE CONTINUED...


	3. Bridge

**TEENAGE GENIN NINJA HEROES**

chapter 3

BRIDGE

JUNE, 12TH YEAR AFTER THE ATTACK OF THE KYUUBI

"AAARRRGH! _WHY_ does he _do_ these things!" howled Haruno Sakura as she scrubbed futilely at the stained fabric of the shirt a friend had loaned her.

"I think it's mostly based on the theory that bad attention is better than no attention," Bakusuta Neshan, the Jounin assigned to teach her and her two teammates the basics of ninja fieldcraft, observed as he leaned over her hunched shoulders and tugged the fabric out of her grip.

"Eh?" she said, then flinched away from the splatter as he snapped the shirt dry with a quick flick of the wrist.

"Hare, rat, rat, ram, hare..." The mud imbedded in the delicately patterned silk shivered slightly, then lifted away to collect into a glistening orb that hovered in mid-air between his hands. "Most useful jutsu in the world. It works on hair, cloth, metal... anything."

"Sugoi. I'll have to remember that. And you're stalling."

"Well, yes. It's not really my place to tell; I've already said more than I should have." And that, she knew, was the end of it.

"Tease."

"It'll do you two good to talk about it." He flicked the sphere of mud out into the center of the stream. "Let's get back."

"Hai!"

They walked through the forest the short distance from the stream to the road, and Uzumaki Naruto, who still had streaks of mud buried in his hair from when his enraged female teammate had ground his head into the same puddle he'd knocked _her_ into, looked up, wearing an uncharacteristically chastened look on his childish, be-whiskered face. "Sakura-chan?"

"What?" she snapped.

"I'm sorry." He bowed his head and fidgeted a little.

She gave him a cockeyed look. "Do you even realize what you're sorry _for_?"

He hesitated. "Aaaahhh... Making you unhappy?"

She shook her head in a sort of horrified wonder. "I didn't-" a hand rested on her shoulder cut her off, and she looked up at her teacher's face. "Sensei?"

"Wouldn't any other answer just mean the same thing, at the very bottom?"

She blinked at him and thought about it for a moment, then sighed and gave Naruto a small smile. "All right. But if you do that again I _won't_ be held responsible for the consequences."

Uchiha Sasuke, that year's Number One Rookie and three time winner of the Konohagakure Ultimate Teen Heartthrob Award (Under 15 division), snorted. "Wonderful. Let's go, then."

"Right!" Naruto and Sakura said, grinning, as their charge, bridge architect Umida Tazuna yawned and heaved himself upright from where he's been resting on a tree root.

"Wait." Neshan held up a hand. "Sasuke, heavy dispel."

The last of the Uchiha blinked in confusion, then nodded. "Hai!" Four quick seals, then- "Oukai no Jutsu!"

Two men dropped from the branches overhead to land in the scruffy grass along the south margin of the road. "Heh heh... You're pretty good, Mr. Leaf," said the taller of the two to the Jounin, adjusting his Hidden Mist headband slightly. "But don't think-"

"Kids, sic 'em. I'll play backstop."

All three Genin reacted to the command instantly - Sasuke lunged for one of the Mist-nin, leading his attack with a kunai that had appeared almost magically in his hand, and Sakura literally seemed to teleport from a standing ready stance to a spinning kick more than twelve feet away, right next to the other. Naruto didn't charge immediately, instead taking a moment to generate an escorting squad of Kagebunshin before he went on the attack.

Sasuke's target flinched back out of range, then dived to one side with the edged chain built into his gauntlet flickering out and free in an arc directly towards Sakura. She avoided it with ease, but the two Mist-nin used her momentary disengagement to cut and run, disappearing into the forest.

"Pursue," the command rapped out, and they did, with Naruto's clones swinging out in a wide arc to cover more ground.

There was silence for a moment, and then Neshan spun and threw a plum-sized sphere in a classic fastball pitch at an apparently innocuous branch. A couple of feet before impact, the ball burst like a confetti firework, scattering bits of paper barely larger than a speck of dust in a pale cloud around the bough. An instant later, the first spark caught and grew into a shattering explosion that knocked the tree over and sent burning splinters showering across the forest floor.

"You _are_ good, spotting my clone like that," said the deep voice thrown to just behind his ear. "But I can't say I know your name."

"Bakusuta Neshan. And you are?" His eyes tracked slowly across the undergrowth of the forest, looking, looking.

"Momoichi Zabuza, once of Hidden Mist... I know that name... what is Konoha's famous sealing genius doing going on a pissant field mission like escorting an architect?"

Not over _there_, which meant... "I'm hardly _that_ great. And I have to teach my team fieldwork _somehow_."

"No," and now the voice was no longer disguised, and coming from behind him... next to Tazuna. "I guess you're not."

All five of Neshan's array of thrown kunai blasted straight through the architect's body and buried themselves deep within the missing-nin's. Both corpses stood for a moment longer, then vanished, one into a puff of smoke and the other into a splash of water.

The younger man brought one hand up and the other down and both back just in time for the massive sword blow aimed at his back to slam into his naginata's interposed pole. A split second later, the butt of the polearm came up and right as he ducked and stepped and spun to the left, slamming the heavy metal pipe into where Zabuza's ribs would have been had the swordsman not pushed down and forward with both blade and feet, hopping high and a little back, out of reach.

"A naginata, huh? That's not a veryWHOA!" Neshan had kept turning as the older Jounin spoke, and added a quick step to the side as the weapon rotated in his grip, trading ends to lead with the razor-edged blade as he came back into striking range and sent it flicking out in a lightning strike that Zabuza barely twisted away from.

The Mist-nin backflipped twice, opening the range before he paused to reevaluate his opponent. For his part, the other simply brought the deceptively slender polearm back into its standard sloping ready position and cocked his head. "What's Gatou paying you, anyway? 'Cause, y'know, we Leaves aren't so terribly pleased with the current Mizukage's 'accidental target misidentification' policy." 'And if you don't piss us off,' went the unspoken part of the message, 'we might be persuaded to see fit to provide some free agent like yourself with the means to do something about that common goal.'

In the blur of combat there hadn't been time for them to take a good look at each other, but in the pause both of them did so. Neshan saw a rangy man of about six feet in height, greasy black hair with a scored Mist hitai-ite, pants and sleeveless shirt in dark blue with the gray mufflers which so many shinobi liked to hide things in on calves and forearms. He knew what Zabuza was seeing, too: a boy or young man in his late teens, with spectacles, Leaf headband, and dark hair pulled back in a knee-length braid, wearing dark grey pants and buttoned shirt under a forest-green high-collared trenchcoat.

"No," the taller of the two said regretfully, "I can't. This time I'm only working for the sake of my hostage to fate." He planted his sword - a massive, squared-off blade almost as long as he was even _without_ the arm-length hilt - firmly in the ground and brought his hands together in the first of a blurringly quick series of seals.

Neshan was caught between sympathy for his foe's unexpected motivation and contempt for his choice of tactics, and firmly suppressed both as he launched another array of kunai and followed the flying blades in.

Horizontal sweep - he knew that pattern - spinning up and around his back and down from overhead as Zabuza keeps backpedaling - Suiryuudan no Jutsu, the water dragon, and they _were_ close enough to the stream for him to use that - lunging forward with the naginata pivoting against the ground towards Zabuza's face like a rake that'd just been stepped on - dragon, snake, rat, he's got seven more to go - then pivoting around the vertical weapon like a pole vaulter to slam both feet into his opponent's chest and knock the larger man flying.

He let the reaction from that impact carry him up and over and back to land on his feet, but by the time he was anchored again Zabuza had recovered and come too close to fight with such a large weapon. He dismissed it, and they exchanged blows for a period that could have been a minute or could have been only a few seconds, and in any event ended with them locked in an awkward grapple with Neshan in a half crouch, one hand trapped between that shoulder and his opponent's chest and the other held outstretched, without the leverage to fight back.

He twitched his wrist back, tapping that hand's fingertips against his opponent's chest, and as he did, sixty-four brilliant streams of chakra erupted from his primary tenketsu and arced up and around to the point of impact. For a fraction of a second - just long enough for the taller man to begin to smile triumphantly - nothing happened.

The ring-shaped secondary shockwave which propagated out perpendicular to the line of the blow was intense enough to scorch skin and set cloth to smoldering, but most of the attack's energy was absorbed carving an eighteen-inch hole through Zabuza's chest and scattering its former contents across a comet-shaped splatter mark fifty feet long. Even the tiny proportion of that force which transferred into the flesh around the hole was enough to knock the fresh corpse flying twice its own length.

"You talk too much," Neshan told the gristly tableau, and then went to find his team.

* * *

Block right, jump over toe kick, block right, block left, grab-twist-yank and drop an elbow across the back of the skull, step back to keep from being splashed as the bunshin dissolves...

"Sasuke-kun!" Sakura snapped from behind him. He turned slightly and glanced out of the corner of his eye as she slipped a blinding thrust past an enemy bunshin's guard and buried a kunai through its temple, then pulled the blade free and spun to slash another's throat open in almost the same motion. "I'll handle the bunshin. Just find the real ones!"

He nodded, then hesitated a moment, running through his options. Yes, that one would do.

"Sabikeibi no Jutsu," he said, and folded his cupped palms open. About a dozen tiny dancing motes of light fluttered up in front of him for a moment, then swirled and darted off into the underbrush.

He followed, and a flicker of orange to his right told him that Naruto had seen the Fireflies also. Leaves and branches tore at his face and then he was out in the open, and there was a gleam of metal heading straight towards him. He flipped over it and crouched on the vertical trunk of a tree, looking 'up' and across at one of the two brothers as the bladed chain he had thrown hissed and slithered along the ground as it was wound back up into its concealing gauntlet.

"SUITON: GYOSHIBUKI NO JUTSU!" Naruto roared as he emerged from cover, spitting a spreading cluster of short, high-density jets of water as he came.

The Kiri-nin dodged, of course, flipping up and back to land on a large branch next to his partner, who at the same time had sent a barrage of shuriken flying at their orange-clad attacker.

They passed harmlessly through him, as though through nothing more than air, and the image smirked and dived back into the bushes. "Bunshin?" asked one of the partners.

"No," said the other. "Some sort of Genjutsu."

"No matter." And they ran through identical sets of five seals in perfect unison. Faint arcs and wisps of chakra began to pass between them, the light pulsing like a heartbeat.

Naruto made another attack, this time dropping from the branches overhead, crying, "SUITON: GYOSH-"

One of the pulses built rapidly into a blinding flare, a flare that swept outward and washed over Naruto and everything in his vicinity. Six feet to his right, a puff of smoke appeared with a sharp popping sound as the Kagebunshin was disrupted.

There was silence, for a moment, as the Kiri-nin stood there watching Sasuke as he watched them, and then another bright flare shattered the tree where he had been sitting. Not that it mattered - appearances aside, he was long gone.

"well?" he asked Naruto as they crouched side by side in the bushes, using the low, quiet tones that carried so much less than the higher frequencies of an actual whisper.

"not sure," the whiskered boy answered. "some kind of area-effect, and related to that pulsing light."

"heterodyne effect," Sakura put in from behind both of them, then subsided to watch as another of Naruto's clones made a third attempt - with no more benefit than the second had gotten. Then she resumed, "like two out of tune musical instruments, how their tones pulse?"

"and the flares are the high points in the wave," the blond boy said slowly, tasting the idea as he spoke. "what's the point?"

"efficient use of power," Sasuke answered. "neither of them is putting in much chakra, but they're getting a very powerful effect."

The kunoichi crawled forward to lie between her teammates and get a good look for herself. "mizubunshin are toast, by the way. what about weaknesses?"

"of course they are," Sasuke said dryly, as though he had never doubted it - and, in truth, he hadn't. "and it'd need to be very finely tuned to work - they probably can't afford to alter the distance between them without breaking the jutsu."

"then we need to move them." She nudged Naruto. "ne, try shuriken this time. they'll have less reaction time."

"way ahead of you," he answered, at the same moment a clone popped out of cover and did exactly that. It was wiped out immediately, but the second attacker some distance away lasted much longer.

Sasuke grinned, fiercely. "they need at least one intermediate pulse before they can fire again."

"and after?" Naruto asked.

Because they were hiding, Sakura refrained from cracking her knuckles. "leave that to me," she grinned, and vanished downward into a careful tunneling jutsu.

Naruto glanced down and where she had been, then looked up to meet his teammate's eyes. 'Scary!' he mouthed with a grin.

"moron," Sasuke said, and then they split up.

As it ended up, splitting their opponents up was harder than it had sounded - the two nuke-nin proved to be able to maintain a constant awareness of their partner's location and react in unison to any threat to _either_ - but Sasuke was able to use a carefully-anchored set of wires to swing around the trunk of the tree they were standing in and hit one at the same time that Naruto bounced off of one of his own clones to clobber the other going in the opposite direction.

Sasuke was too occupied gift-wrapping the man he had hit to spare attention for the other, but then, the startled yelp, sudden scuffle, and horrible, particularly _final_ crunching noise that followed the other's landing on the forest floor assured him that there was no need to worry.

There was a quiet, muffled snap! as he tugged the last loop of wire closed, and it took him a moment to realize what the Kiri-nin had done. Then he swore and flipped the larger man over onto his back. "Naruto, help!" he yelled, tearing the gas-mask away from the other's face and grabbing firmly to his jaw and then there was another pair of hands helping hold him still and they had yanked his mouth open and Sasuke didn't hesitate at all to jam his fingers down his throat to trigger the gag reflex...

Too late, he realized as the other - whose name, he suddenly recalled, he still did not know - began to thrash and foam at the mouth as the poison hidden in his hollow tooth took effect. The measure was a standard one for the Village of the Hidden Mist, he remembered now that it no longer mattered, and the toxin a violent one that killed in seconds rather than minutes.

A hand rested gently on his shoulder as he and Naruto watched their enemy's last moments. "Suicide?" Neshan asked.

"Hai, Sensei."

"...Don't worry about it."

"Hai, Sensei."

* * *

Hyuuga Neji came before the assembled elders of his clan with hands bound and head high.

He had known, from the moment he calmed sufficiently to once more evaluate the shape of his fate, that he was probably going to die. Indeed, if he were to be fully honest with himself, he was rather looking forwards to it. On the one hand, he would be dead. On the other, however, he would have the satisfaction of knowing that he had, in that same stroke, defied his destined slavery, exposed the inherent corruption and hypocrisy of the Hyuuga to the entire village, and irrevocably torn the lying webs of that simpering little spider that had been hiding behind the mask of his 'shy, quiet cousin'.

All in all, that was as good a cause as any other.

The elders of the Hyuuga were seated along the sides of a long table of ancient steelwood, whose grain had been buffed to a fine polish by hundred of hands over the years but had at the same time resisted every blade's attempts to so much as scratch it.

His 'uncle', the clan head, Hiashi, knelt in seiza at the head of the table, with that lying little _spider_ faking concern and self-effacement from slightly behind and to his right.

Except for the pair of iron-faced wardens hovering just outside the chamber's door, he was the only member of the Branch Family present.

Hyuuga Inei, seniormost of the Ten Elders of the Hyuuga clan, leaned forward and glared at the boy he would never think to acknowledge as his great-nephew. "Neji, son of Hizashi, of the Branch House of the Hyuuga Clan, do you know what you have done to be called here before us today?"

So pompous, so fucking arrogant, just as though _he_ had the _right!_ Neji throttled his temper back and let the icy control in his voice speak of more contempt than any outburst could have shown. "I have challenged a villain, and offended a pack of blind old fools."

"You have broken your sacred oath!" snapped another of the elderly men arrayed along the sides of the table. "You have shamed your ancestors with your ingratitude for the gifts the Main House has given you! To attack _any_ you have sworn to serve, let alone-"

"I swore no oath," Neji said coldly. "I am not my ancestors. I owe _nothing_ to those who murdered my father."

"Mind you place, child!" Inei roared, and his voice echoed with the memory of a power and charisma that, in its prime, would have stunned any who faced it.

The boy Konoha had hailed as the genius of the Hyuuga permitted himself a sneer. "A slave's place, you mean? A man is not a slave until he is broken - and the likes of _you_ will never break me."

Most of the elders exploded in shouts of rage, and the Eldest's jaw worked and choking noises came from his throat as he tried to force coherent words out past his fury. "I! You! You _insolent_! _Cur_, how _dare_ you! I will see you-"

"YOU SHALL _NOT_!" came a voice like the Devil's own flute, and there was a smack of flesh on the wood of the table as Hyuuga Hinata shocked everyone - herself not least of all - by coming to her feet in a burst of rage and will so pure that Inei's tirade ended as abruptly as it did involuntarily, cut off by the way his jaw snapped shut, as though of its own will.

There was silence for a moment, and then a spiderweb of cracks split the table lengthwise along its grain, starting from the place where Hinata had unconsciously forced a burst of chakra as she slammed her palm against its surface for emphasis. It stayed that way for a moment, and then the two halves creaked slightly and fell majestically away from each other.

Hyuuga Keshitomaru had succeeded as a ninja by always maintaining a controlled and rational demeanor, and in the shocked silence that followed as they all stared at the wreckage of the table, he met Hinata's eyes and said, not unkindly, "Hush, child, please. As much as the shock may have benefited my colleagues' state of mind, your presence as an observer is a courtesy - it is not yours to participate in our deliberations."

The Heir of the Hyuuga clan stared in frozen shock for a moment longer, then shook herself slightly and settled back into seiza in her previous position. "A-a-ano, s-sir, you are m-mistaken." She took a deep breath, visibly gathering her composure, then continued. "Ano... D-during the rule of the Sh-shichidaime Raikage, the... the clan head, Hyuuga Urumu was p-prone to fits of, of, of madness. Wh-when h-he was in one of h-h-his... episodes, his son, H-hyuuga Hare, was... anoo... allowed t-to speak in his p-place. Th-there were m-more than thirty times afterward when, when th-the heir spoke in deliberation."

"IDIOT COWARD GIRL!" Hyuuga Akaragao roared, seeming, as he often did, on the verge of an apoplectic fit. "YOU MIGHT THINK THAT YOUR PULING LIES WILL PROTECT YOU FROM-"

"She's right," said Hyuuga Shito with a distasteful twist of his lips, cutting across Akaragao's bellow with the ease of long practice. "The precedent is as she says, and has been upheld in numerous different cases, although admittedly never in recent times." He paused to regard her for a moment. While Hinata had always been shy, he had actually been rather startled by her newfound habit of simply sitting and trembling when confronted. It was nice to see the girl recovering - even if her timing _was_ abysmal.

Especially since she had known her history well enough to quote the case so perfectly. She could never be clan head, really - not after her performance against Hanabi - but that combination of academic excellence and supportive personality had other uses, and he had to train a successor as clan archivist sooner or later.

"Very well, Hinata-hime. You have an argument?"

She smiled - just a subtle tension around the corners of the eyes and a barely perceptible curve of the lips, but it transformed her face, and warmed his heart in a way that _nothing_ had since the death of his wife - and bowed politely. "A... ano, I-I would wish t-t-to remind my seniors of... of the Right of Satisfaction."

Akagarao laughed. "The pride of the Branch house against the shame of the Main! That might actually be interesting." He sneered. "_If_ we were so stupid as to permit it."

The Heir's eyes sparked. "Under p-precedent, you... you have no choice."

* * *

"Ano sa, ano sa, is this the place?" Naruto asked, jerking his head at the largish house sitting on the border between sea and forest.

Sakura checked the slip of paper she had fished out of her pocket once they got to the edge of the town and nodded. "Should be. Let's check."

Neshan stepped forward and knocked. The woman who opened the door in response was tall and pretty without being beautiful - or she would have been, anyway, if fear and worry hadn't drawn her face so harshly taunt. "Yes?"

"Umida Tsunami?"

Her eyes flicked across their faces, darting from one hitae-ate to another. She flinched.

The Jounin smiled gently, reassuringly. "Your father has contracted my team to deliver something to you."

His explanation of their mission - and his use of the present tense for the man not present - were enough of a relief that she had to lean gently against the doorframe to stay upright. "He's all right?"

"Sakura?"

The female Genin stepped forward and pulled out another piece of paper - this time, a small scroll, which she handed to the older woman. Tsunami's hands trembled as she opened it and began to read, but she didn't hesitate in the slightest.

Which meant that, all too quickly, her eyebrows went up in a puzzled frown. "'Person...?'"

BAMF

"Keeping your principal in a safe place for the trip and then summoning him using a jutsu at the final destination isn't a standard procedure," Neshan explained, "because it requires considerably more manpower. At the very least, you'll need one team to protect him and one more to deliver the scroll. On the other hand, Konohagakure is a high-security area anyway, and no one would look twice at another visitor to the capital of the Fire Country... especially if he wasn't even wearing his own face."

Tazuna chuckled as he pulled his daughter into a hug. "As super-weird as it sounded when you explained it to me, I guess this plan of yours was a good idea after all."

The Jounin shrugged. "Maybe. But that last nukenin worries me - I was hoping to catch all four of them."

"Maybe so, but there's not much we can do about it now, is there?"

"Actually," Tsunami broke in, "There might be."

"Oh?" His eyebrows went up. "Do tell."

"Come inside," she said, and they did. Eventually, after tea had been served and Sakura had threatened Naruto into silence, she explained.

"In the last few days there have been a number of very confusing rumors going around - mostly to the effect that someone has killed Gatou and taken over his criminal contacts. I wouldn't mention it, except that the things that that devil-woman is supposed to do to people don't sound like they could come from anything but a ninja." She took a sip of tea. "One of the other things the rumors are consistent on is where she's been basing her operations - an old Kirigakure outpost in the swamps along the eastern coast of the island."

Neshan took a deep breath and nodded. "All right. Sakura and I will check it out in the morning, while Sasuke and Naruto stay with you, Umida-san."

The aging engineer simply nodded, and before the conversation could move on to other things, a voice interrupted from the bottom of the stairwell. "Who are these people?"

"Ah!" Tazuna stood, smiled, and gestured towards his guards. "These four are the super-skilled ninja who've been contracted to protect me while we finish the bridge. Ninja-san, this is my grandson, Inari."

The young boy standing at the foot of the stairs adjusted his fisherman's hat and walked over to stare up at Neshan, the oldest of the ninja and the obvious leader. "What kind of fool risks his life for nothing but money?" he sneered.

"Hey, you!" Naruto yelled, advancing towards the younger boy. "You should-"

Neshan laid a restraining hand on his student's shoulder. "A tyrant thrown down, a nation freed, thousands of lives bettered... That's a success worth dying for, I think."

"You're a moron!" The boy snapped, fists clenched at his sides. "You're just going to fail and get yourself killed!"

The ninja looked down at those furious eyes and shrugged. "Maybe. But nobody lives forever, and at least I'll die trying."

* * *

There was a quiet, almost subliminal noise in the background as they made their cautious way through the deserted headquarters, like an unnamable hybrid of dripping liquid and the thin keening of wind through open rafters. Despite its wooden construction, the building had old-fashioned torch nooks every dozen feet or so, but they were empty and cold, leaving jagged swathes of shadow to spiderweb their way across the walls and ceiling.

Sakura paused before opening the first door. "Sensei... I smell..."

"Yeah. Me too."

She took a deep breath and tried to ignore the coppery aftertaste that that scent brought to her mouth.

Then she opened the door, and was immediately occupied with avoiding the aftertaste of that morning's breakfast. She succeeded, barely, and Neshan simply closed his eyes sadly for a moment once he realized what he was looking at. A moment and a soft, sighing breath later, he opened them and closed the door behind him, leaving his student standing in the hallway and - to her relief - cutting off all view of that... pocket of hell.

_Dear gods, please, let me _never_ understand how someone could use human skin to do..._ her mind shied away from the image. In the back of her consciousness, another part of her mind clenched its metaphorical fists. **This bitch is fucking _dead_**, she vowed, and for once her more public half couldn't have agreed more.

She glanced away as the door opened. "Sensei... do we have to..."

"Yes. Anything we can learn is needed; no matter what we have to wade through."

She swallowed. "'A ninja is someone who does whatever it takes,'" she said, bouncing one of his favorite maxims back at him.

"Exactly." And with no further words needed, they moved calmly through, checking each room as they passed. Fortunately for Sakura's stomach, rooms like the first were rare - some of the others had old bloodstains spread across every surface, but for the most part there was nothing to indicate that people had ever been present.

"Well, at least the kitchen's normal."

"Take another look at what's on the spit."

"..._Thanks_, Sensei. That's _exactly_ the image I needed to have in my head before dinnertime."

"You've been spending too much time around me. You're starting to pick up my sense of humor."

"At least we know that Gatou-san isn't a threat anymore."

"Granted, but do you really think that this psycho-bitch needs to get paid for this?"

"Point."

And then, at last, they came to a largish room just off of the building's massive central chamber. Neshan paused outside of it, and raised one eyebrow in an unspoken question as he met his student's eyes. 'Do you feel it?'

She blinked, then closed her eyes and concentrated for a moment. Eventually, she opened them and shrugged. 'No, nothing.'

He opened the door. At the center of the squarish room was a plain wooden table a little more than waist high for an adult. It was slightly inclined, and had deep grooves running its length arranged for maximum drainage. Much of the table was crusted to a dark brick red, as was a broad circular swathe of the floor centered underneath the table's lower end. Thin streams of brighter red flowed slowly down the grooves to drip and splash in the tiny puddles underneath the ends of the gutters.

The person - the boy - lying naked on the table looked like an image out of a nightmare. Vast patches of his skin were either missing entirely or stretched and opened away from the flesh underneath by thin cords depending from the ceiling. More cords wrapped around the table and into and _through_ his body, binding him tightly against the rough wood, and still others supported both the several still-living organs held in the air above his motionless body and the blood vessels that kept them as part of the whole.

For a moment, she thought that that nightmarish web of strings was nothing more than simple thread, but as she looked closer she realized - from their appearance and slight, moist glisten and _where_ they penetrated into his body - that they had almost certainly actually been woven from living connective tissue.

"What a horrible way to die," she murmured unconsciously.

The boy on the table turned his head to look at her, and his eyes were clear and all too lucid amid the horrible scarring and desecrated flesh that had once been a human face. "...who..."

She ran. She turned and bolted and curled up in one of the farthest corners of the main chamber to hug her knees as close to her chest as she could manage and hyperventilate until either she passed out or that image burned into her soul went away.

Some time later - she would never be precisely sure how long - someone rested a gentle hand on her shoulder. Since she had unconsciously picked up his chakra approaching, she didn't jump in fright, but instead only looked up into her Sensei's concerned eyes.

"Are you okay?"

She swallowed, then nodded convulsively.

"All right." And she stood when he beckoned, and then followed him back into That Room.

"his name is haku," Neshan said to her in an undertone as he began to divest himself of most of his usual ninja gear and pile it into her arms. "and what you could see of what that woman did to him is barely even the half of it. i've managed to get him stable enough to move without danger, but we're going to need to get him to a real hospital as soon as physically possible." He paused, hesitating. "don't let him see you."

Then he walked over to stand next to the bandaged form on the table and said, gently. "I'm sorry. This will hurt."

"...w..t..." Haku whispered.

The Jounin leaned closer. "Yes?"

"...where... going...?" he forced out.

"Konoha. You'll be welcome there."

A tear gathered at the corner of one eye, then dropped and started to trace its way through the pattern of those horrible scars. "...never... want...me..."

Neshan smiled. "Konoha was founded by a number of clans who had run from different countries, each for their own reasons. Some wanted to escape being used for others' agendas; others were tired of being persecuted, and still more saw a chance to gain greater power as part of a new nation rather than an old. Regardless, they all went into what was, at the time, an impenetrable jungle full of lethal plants and nin-beasts... and they were all dedicated to building a nation where people with Bloodline Limits like theirs could live as equals rather than tools or demons. Things've changed some since then, of course, but the Hidden Village of the Leaf still holds more Bloodlines than all the other nations put together." He leaned down and adjusted the bandage across Haku's forehead before picking him up in his arms with infinite gentleness. "You'll fit right in."

* * *

JULY, 12TH YEAR AFTER THE ATTACK OF THE KYUUBI

Sakura was nervous, and she didn't know why. Haku was safe, Gatou was dead, his company was in disarray, and his pet psychopath hadn't shown her face in weeks. There was absolutely nothing to suggest that the maniac hadn't just packed up and left, but some fragment of her subconscious kept insisting that they hadn't seen the last of that twisted mind.

As time had gone by, Team 7 had settled on the routine of having Naruto - or rather, his obligatory retinue of shadow clones - do most of the watching while the other three members took shifts staying close to their principal. While the clones couldn't observe any better than their creator, they _could_ be in as many as twelve places at once, making up in redundancy and proximity what they lacked in acuity. Naruto himself simply rested and studied most of the time, conserving his chakra to replace the guards when the energy supplies holding them together ran out.

The construction workers who actually had to labor on the bridge while the four ninja apparently sat around and did nothing had been surprisingly understanding. All but a very few of them had had experience in other professions, like fishing, which made up for long dry periods with bursts of intense activity, and the site's grapevine had comfortably absorbed the idea that ninja duties followed the same pattern.

"Oi, Boss!" one of the men clustered around the bottom of the newest piling shouted up at Tazuna. "When are we due for lunch?"

"Finish that, then take a half hour!" their superior bellowed back.

"Yosh'! We'll do that!"

Naruto had been stretched out on his belly with an elbow on either side of the scroll he was working on, but now he rolled over to stare up at where his teammate was perching cross-legged on one of the bridge's railing's posts. "Ne, ne, Sakura-chan?"

She blinked and swore as his voice broke her concentration, disrupting the finely-metered flow of chakra she had been using to fold an origami crane in the palms of her cupped hands and tearing the delicate paper. _"What!"_

He flinched and crab-walked a couple feet further away. "Eheheh... nothing, nothing!" he said, with a nervous grin.

She glared for a moment longer, then sighed. "Sorry. If I need to concentrate that hard then I guess I haven't got it down yet, have I?"

He nodded blankly. "If you say so, Sakura-chan!"

Sakura snickered and fished out another sheet of origami paper, then paused for a long moment before setting it gently on her knee. "Naruto?"

He twisted around to sit upright as he took in her tone of voice. "Eh?"

"A couple of weeks ago... You remember what happened just before those Nuke-nin attacked?"

His face scrunched up in thought for a moment, and then he grinned. "Oh, yeah! There was that puddle... and..." Halfway through the sentence he seemed to remember exactly why he had thought the incident was funny, and also why mentioning that fact might not be the smartest thing for him to do.

The girl on the pole had taken out a kunai and begun twirling it between her fingers as he spoke, and she kept the motion and matching glare up for a moment before tucking the blade away and letting him off the hook with a smile. "If it hadn't been me, it actually -might- have been funny," she admitted. "But that wasn't what I was really thinking of. See, Sensei said something while I was trying to get the dress clean that stuck in my mind - that he thought you'd done it because 'bad attention was better than no attention.'" The last phrase she delivered with a fair imitation of their teacher's voice and accent, with its guttural 'r's and odd pitches.

The smile on Naruto's face slid away abruptly, and he glanced aside rather than meet her eyes. "Yeah?"

She stared at him, taking in his fisted hands and the tension in his jaw - a posture, she suddenly realized, much like that he'd adopted that first day, when he had told her and Sasuke about his status as a Jinchuuriki.

Something someone else had said about him came to mind, and she sighed quietly and glanced down, folding the fragile paper between her fingers in one of the dozens of intricate patterns Suzume-sensei had made the entire Girl's Class at the Academy memorize before she'd let them move on to more obvious things like disguise or chakra theory. "'He doesn't have any parents... The sadness of having a parent yell at you is nowhere near what he feels,'" she quoted, with a sad smile. "Sasuke-kun told me that, when I was..." She sighed, and pressed the completed tulip between her palms to sharpen the creases. "I was ranting on like a blind little idiot."

He jerked, almost as though he had been struck, and stared up at her. "What? No! Sakura-chan, you're not an idiot! You're the smartest person I know! Even Sensei says you're smarter than him!"

A paper tulip bounced off his nose. "_Being_ smart isn't the same as _acting_ smart - as you ought to know better than anyone, ne?"

Naruto rubbed a hand across the back of his neck and chuckled nervously. Then he blinked. "Wait, wait... _Sasuke _said that? That stuck-up bastard?"

She leaned to one side a little, and then kicked him, gently, in the head. "Sasuke-kun is -not- stuck up! He's just..." she hunted for the right word for a moment. "...reserved."

He stuck his tongue out at her. "_Sensei_ is reserved. Sasuke's an ice cube." She gave him a skeptical look, and after a moment he sighed and looked at his hands again. "But, I guess... if he could say that, then... he couldn't be as bad as I thought." The serious moment vanished as he broke back into a grin. "Damn if I know _how_, though!"

"Eh?" Sakura uncrossed her legs and turned towards him, leaning her elbows on her knees. "You don't know?"

"Know what?"

"His family, his clan, the Uchiha..." she said slowly, very serious. "They were all killed." He just stared, so she explained. "It was... I think three or four years ago. One of the clan members, an ANBU who had been under consideration for promotion to Captain, went... mad... and..."

Both of them were silent, remembering what their quiet teammate had said during that first dinner together. 'To kill a certain person...' Eventually, though, Sakura's mind turned back to where the conversation had started. "Naruto..."

"Yeah, Sakura-chan?"

She had been looking down at the concrete under the piling she was sitting on, but now raised her head to meet his eyes as she slowly worked out what she wanted to say. "All those times you said... 'Let's go on a date...' You... weren't just trying to bother me, were you."

When she said it like that... He felt like launching himself into a dozen cartwheels in a row, but didn't. He was learning to see patterns in things, and the pattern here was that that kind of thing, the acceptance he'd wanted to see so much, hadn't come from any of his joking or clowning, but from a quiet, serious conversation. So he didn't let himself even smile, and instead just said, with as much honest sincerity as he could muster, "No. Not with that."

She looked away for a long moment. 'You're annoying,' whispered two different voices from out of her memory. "Lets make a deal."

_She likes _Sasuke_, you moron!_ he reminded himself. _Remember that!_ "A deal?"

"If you'll act like... a real person, rather than... someone out to cause as much chaos as he can... Then, I promise I'll..." she broke off and sighed. "I love Sasuke. It used to be just how he looks or how good people say he is, but now, since we graduated, he's a _person_, a _friend_, who's hurting, who I want to help, no matter what it costs me." She looked up and met her teammate's eyes again. "So... I can't give you what you want. But... I'll give you as much as I can."

"sakura-chan..." he whispered, eyes wide and teary.

She smiled, and held out a hand. "Friends?"

He took it. "Friends!"

They shook on it, and laughed, and then one of Naruto's clones pelted down the bridge to skid to a halt in front of its prototype, gasping for breath. "Boss! We... We got big trouble!"

"Huh?" Naruto and Sakura traded a glance, then turned to stare at the construct. "Trouble?"

It nodded, so fast it almost looked like its head was about to come off. "Uh huh! There's, there's half a dozen of these... zombie things, with bits missing and insides hanging out and skin dangling off and these stitches all over! There're coming this way! One of the others got close to them, so we could see what'd happen, and they just... tore him apart! Bam! They're real fast!"

Naruto blinked, then grabbed the clone's shoulder. "Go wake Sasuke. Tell him what's going on - _now_!"

It flipped him a casual salute and pelted off, and he turned to Sakura. "Tell Sensei -"

She was already nodding. "And then cover Tazuna-san. Right!"

They traded a glance, and then she was gone and he was concentrating deeply. He formed the seal - pushed the chakra - and then sent half of the fresh Kagebunshin to evacuate the work crew before following the others to buy more time.

The... _things_ shambling out of the forest and towards the shore end of the bridge looked like someone had constructed some malformed array of nin-puppets out of dismembered human body parts. Their frameworks were clearly human skeletons, but their arms were attached wrong, some had extra joints, others no head, and none of them had any skin - instead, their muscles and sinews stretched and flexed and glistened wetly in the open air.

The day's deliveries for the construction had already arrived, so there were no boats moored to the causeway's outer end - which meant that the ninja would have to hold that end clear until Tazuna and the other workers could get clear.

That, in itself, would have been easy enough - there were less than a dozen of these, these ghouls, and they have four powerful ninja to work with - except that the distracting frontal attack was about as classic a setup for a knife in the back as there _was_. Naruto knew his own weaknesses, though - self-knowledge had to be the first step of any successful plan, after all - and observation topped the list. He could travel, he could throw, he could hold his own in a taijutsu fight and boy, oh boy could he do ninjutsu, but he wasn't devious enough to cast good genjutsu and a threat virtually had to walk right up and bop him on the nose before he'd be able to notice it.

Those traits were, for the most part, as well-suited to the front lines of a battle as they were _poorly_ matched with the constant caution and watchfulness required of a bodyguard. Either of his teammates, though, could have done quite well in either role - Sasuke was observant, Sakura was even more so, and both of them could fight like anything.

Sensei... well, he was a Jounin, 'nuff said, but once that and its implications were accepted he, too, was better suited to the battle line - and, if needed, he could quickly cover the ground between either of the team's elements.

Since Naruto knew all that, and knew that Neshan knew that, it was no surprise when he heard his teacher's voice from just over his shoulder, as calm and mile as always. "Well?"

Hm. How to handle this... Sensei could have just given him his orders of course, but the older boy - man, and how _weird_ to realize that the law said _he_ was in that category now, too - had said that he thought that the three Genin would learn best by experience, by shaping their own course. His own role was, first, to teach them _how_ to do so - how to learn, and why they should work to. Second, to act as a resource to learn _from_, whether tapping into his experience on the battlefield or the jutsu he could teach them or even, as was often the case with _their_ teacher, the details of the past and how they affected the present and future. And, finally, third, to act as a safety net, and prevent their otherwise promising careers from being snuffed out by some minor mistake that only a novice would have made. "An area trap?" he suggested. "Something like a spider's web, to hold them in place?"

"They exist. I don't have one." Neshan's voice was harsh and taunt, though still controlled. Naruto knew it wasn't directed at him - Sensei believed in being prepared for his battles, sometimes even relied on it _too_ much, and would regard any gap in his readiness as a personal failure... something he forgave easily enough in others, but never in himself.

"Too many to just mix it up with and keep busy..." the Genin thought out loud. "And too many other unknowns. Chikusho! Attack?" he asked, since if the enemy's numbers made conventional delaying tactics impossible, the only thing open to them was to reduce those numbers until other options became practical.

"Attack," his superior confirmed.

It had almost been time to replace his picket clones when he and Sakura had started their conversation, which meant that he was about as fresh as he could be. And _that_ meant... He hopped up onto one of the causeway's pilings, then bounced off it to get as much height as he could. One, two, _three_! "KATON: GOUKAKYU NO JUTSU!"

A couple of the monsters ducked out of the way, but the reason he had picked that technique, rather than one of the other fire types he knew, was that it combined power (which was useful) with a large area of effect - particularly if the user was trying to spread it, rather than concentrate it. If these things were as freakish and inhuman as they looked, then they wouldn't even feel any pain from being lit on fire like that - but having their connective tissues and driving muscles burn away to ash should slow them down more than a bit, and if they really were as close to being nin-puppets as the resemblance between their motions and the descriptions he'd read of the Sunagakure specialty looked, then touching them and taking himself into range of a contact trap would have been a real bad idea anyway.

One of the ghouls was lunging at him now, with flames licking off its upper surfaces like a canopy of trees on a hill, so he ducked to the side and slashed a kunai across the underside of the arm it had attacked with and severed the tendons there - it might not bleed, but without _those_, that arm was useless - and spun as he dropped into a crouch and brought a second blade out in his other hand to cut the monster's hamstrings (which were clearly visible - YUK!) in two quick strokes.

Then he skittered left and lunged forward and upright to slam both of the heavy throwing knives _through_ the shoulder joints of the ghoul that had tried to sneak up on him while he was dealing with its companion. There was a crunch of shattering bone as the blades' design concentrated the force of his weight and muscles into two unyielding points less than a millimeter across and then he was dancing out of the way of the kick it launched as the impact of his strikes knocked it flat on its back and left it wriggling there helplessly without a spare limb to pull it around and get its legs back under it.

That won him a second to spare, and he used it to glance over and check on Sensei. His help wasn't need, he saw, and actually he hadn't expected it to be - but you just _didn't_ leave a teammate's safety to chance when there was something you might be doing about it. If you couldn't see them, then it didn't _matter_ how certain you thought you were - you damn well checked and made sure!

Some part of the back of his mind had been monitoring the work crew as they flooded past the fight, and even as he finished dumping another dozen Kagebunshin into the fray Naruto was turning towards where one of the frailer members of the group had tripped and fallen and was being helped to his feet by Tazuna.

Sasuke shouted, Neshan cursed, and Sakura's kick obliterated half the man's skull, snapped his neck, and knocked his corpse flying in the bargain, but by then it was too late, and the engineer was already beginning to thrash and scream as the poison on the needles that had erupted from the worker's chest to bury themselves in his arms and nearer leg began to work its lethal way into his bloodstream.

Naruto forced himself not to think about it, and launched himself back into the covering action beside his teacher, but he still caught a glimpse, out of the corner of his eye, of his two teammates trading a wordless question.

Then Sasuke shouted at the construction workers to start moving again, and Sakura screamed and threw herself at the nearest cluster of ghouls.

* * *

None of them wanted to think about what they'd have to tell Tsunami-san, who'd been so kind - any more than they wanted to think about the fact that they were actually _glad_ that the waiting was over, and that Gatou's mysterious fifth shinobi had made a move they could react to.

It was too similar to be a coincidence.

Sasuke's jaw clenched. This woman _knew_ them, knew _him_, and had deliberately arranged her murder of their host's family to...

"She's changed their clothes," he told his teammates.

"Yeah, so?" Naruto asked. "It's just a Henge."

The dark-haired Genin didn't answer directly, instead simply crouching down to roll... Tsunami-san's corpse... over onto its front, ignoring the tacky, drying blood and dangling shreds of flesh.

"Kuso," the shorter of his teammates whispered, with an uncharacteristically pale expression.

"The Uchiha crest..." the third murmured, looking puzzled for a moment, then her eyes widened. "No! This is like..."

"That day. Yes."

"Sasuke..." she said, reaching out a hand, helplessly offering... neither of them was certain what.

He nodded to her, acknowledging and showing gratitude for the effort at the same time as he refused it, and said, "Let's look around. Maybe this... madwoman left something we can use."

And they did, spreading out to cover the entire house and its immediate grounds thoroughly.

"Well?" Sakura asked eventually, leaning over their sensei's shoulder to glance at the tracks he was examining.

"You know already. She's made it too obvious; she _wants_ to be followed." He sighed and sat back on his heels. "Unfortunately, I don't see much else that we can do at this point."

Naruto snorted. "Well, then, what are we waiting for!" And with that he was gone, and Sasuke close behind.

"Sakura."

She turned to look at her teacher, and that constant unease that had been dogging her was back again. She had never heard him sound that serious. "Hai, Sensei?"

"I... Haku told me about our enemy. I'd spare the three of you from this if I could - but I'm not strong enough to win this without you." He hesitated. "I... I'm sor-"

She cut him off. "It's all right. I understand about duty."

He nodded sadly, and then they followed her teammates.

* * *

"Looking for me, Sasuke-kun?"

Team 7 stopped in place and spun as a single body.

Sasuke knew, looking at last at the face of their enemy, that she must have been beautiful, once. She was tall, for a woman, almost six feet, and if she hadn't looked so worn and starved then her long, powerful frame and lethal ninja's grace would have been outright riveting. As it was, even with the scars seaming her body and his knowledge of what she was capable of, she was still attractive. Her yukata-like dress had long, sweeping sleeves but was cut high across her thighs, and its brilliant red fabric was scattered with irregular patches of darker red, particular around the cuffs and the lower edges of the sleeves.

Her long, slightly feathery pink hair swept and tangled behind her in an unrestrained mass which was held back from her face by a Konoha hitae-ite across the top of her head. Its slightly tarnished surface had had a deep, straight score etched across its distinguishing sigil. Her eye sockets were badly scarred, and the organs occupying them had obviously been transplanted, since one of them gleamed with the deceptive white blankness of the Hyuuga Byakugan.

"Sharingan," he breathed, as he took in the other. And indeed it was, blood red, with three comma-shaped secondary pupils spinning slowly around the central fourth.

"Yours, even, Sasuke-kun" the apparition said, with a horrible parody of a giggle. "And the other gives _dear_ Hina-chan another look at you at last, Naruto."

"H-hina-chan?" Naruto stuttered, transfixed as a songbird facing a snake.

"Hyuuga Hinata, Naruto," Their sensei said idly. "And no, we weren't, quite yet. We wanted to figure out what you wanted, first."

"I want you to suffer, of course. And then I want you to die. Your blood and your agony... I want to splash around like a little girl as it puddles at my feet. I want to bathe in it, caress it, impale myself on it, devour it."

Sasuke, despite all the years of effort he had invested in controlling his actions and emotions, flinched away from the thought. "Sakura...san... Why would you-"

She cut him off with a snarl. "Why? Why do you think, you condescending fucking ice-hearted traitor! Because you pushed me down, because you tried to break me, because you tried to _own_ me, you and that fucking fox-bastard crashing around trying to sneak up behind me." She cocked her head and leaned forward with her hands braced on her knees and a secretive little smile on her face. "And you'll pay for it - pay in full, both of you and especially that cowardly little cunt beside you."

Sakura - their Sakura, the younger girl with the short temper - had been standing frozen, trembling slightly and trying frantically to reconcile herself to the instinctive, bone-deep knowledge that this woman, this nightmare, _was_, in every meaningful way, _her_.

The other purred slightly, and licked her lips, taking a slow step towards the terrified Genin, but their sensei stepped in to intervene. "Then I guess I'll have to stop you."

The Smile widened, hungry and eager. "Do you really think you can beat me?"

He gave a smile of his own. Being scared wouldn't accomplish anything, nor being angry. With those gone, he could appreciate the humor of the situation, black as it was. "Not unless you do something a lot dumber than I expect you to. But a draw isn't out of the question."

She laughed, and if they hadn't been able to see her eyes, then it would have seemed perfectly natural and human... which made it all the worse, of course. "Who do you think you're talking to?" She leaned forward again, and spoke in a mock-confidential tone. "I'm the perfect killer!"

crich

gunch

"I take a lot of killing."

TO BE CONTINUED...

* * *

Yes, I am a cruel, evil son-of-a-bitch. Especially since, despite the fact that I've missed my deadlines (Sorry 'bout that, BTW) for the last couple weeks, I'm going to break my pattern and not post Chapter 4 until _next_ week. Watching my prereaders react to this was the most fun I've had on this project to date, and it just wouldn't be the same if you folks could just click a button and read the next chapter, would it?

_Do_ let me know what you think, hey?

Ja, -n


	4. Nightmare

**TEENAGE GENIN NINJA HEROES**

chapter 4

NIGHTMARE

* * *

JULY, TWELFTH YEAR AFTER THE ATTACK OF THE KYUUBI

"Who do you think you're talking to?" The tall woman in the blood spattered dress leaned forward and mock-confided, "I'm the perfect killer!"

Bakusuta Neshan, the leader and most experienced of the four-man team facing her, smiled and shot back, "I take a lot of killing."

Haruno Sakura - the older person by that name - threw her head back and laughed in a way that seemed entirely too human and alive to be coming from the mouth of so soulless and evil a murderer. "Well, I guess it's a good thing I brought backup, then."

Then, with a dramatic snap of her fingers, three massive stone sarcophagi erupted out of the dirt like as ominous trees, sprouting from the underworld through the wonders of time-lapse photography.

"N-nani... What the hell is this?" asked Uzumaki Naruto, the shortest of the Genin, whose uncharacteristically pale face was clashing with the fabric of his vibrant orange jumpsuit.

Neshan glanced across the three coffins out of the corner of his eye. "It's called Edo Tensei. It's a kinjutsu that uses the prepared corpse of a human sacrifice as a vessel to anchor a soul pulled from the underworld into this world. In short, it allows the user to raise the dead. It_ is_ possible to get a... complete resurrection from it, but I've never heard of anyone actually using it that way. By the time someone is twisted enough to consider it, they're more interested in having a powerful puppet than they are in bringing back the dearly departed."

The coffins opened.

Sasuke flinched as the first of the ragged corpses stepped out of its container. After the way That Woman had kept mocking his memories, he really wasn't surprised to see that she had chosen the most disturbing summons she could think of, but that didn't really make it any easier to handle - although, at least it wasn't one of his parents.

"Well, then," that person who was not, could not be, Sakura, smiled. "I guess it's time for you to meet your ghosts." She cocked her head, affecting to just remember something. "Oh, and gomen-ne, Jounin-san - You'll have to make do with Kakashi's for now, since you've stolen his life."

"Bakusuta Neshan. My name is Bakusuta Neshan."

Six kunai came out and were in flight before any of the younger ninja could blink. Three, trailing seal-covered slips of paper in their wake, buried themselves in the haggard corpses she had summoned... and the other three barely missed deflecting them.

"Shit. Missed."

Again, that disturbing, impossibly natural laugh as their dead came alive in front of them and moved to attack.

* * *

Naruto couldn't move. He _could not_. His hands trembled, his mouth was dry, and his throat was squeezed shut tight. His most precious possession, when he was younger, had been a worn, faded photograph of a pretty young woman with blue eyes and a very familiar mischievous grin. He couldn't even regret having brought it to the academy, that day, because he had met Sakura-chan when she came to help him as he was frantically trying to pick up the shreds. "You... you're..."

"That's right." She was short and slender, probably the smallest adult woman he had ever seen, and even the fox-mask pushed high on her head wouldn't have been enough to make her distinctive presence into just another ANBU.

"'Kaasan..." he whispered.

"How touching," Sa- - no, dammit, that devil could _never_ be his Sakura-chan - sneered. "Enjoy your reunion while it lasts, sweetie," she told his mother, "then kill him."

Summon and summoner traded a narrow-eyed glare, and then the smaller woman reached up and tossed her mask away. She looked at her son for a moment, drinking in the sight of him like a woman lost in the desert who has stumbled onto an oasis, and smiled warmly. "I can't be sorry for this..."

He flinched.

She laughed, and stepped forward to push his chin up and force him to meet her eyes. "The chance to see my beloved boy grow and become a man? Become a great ninja like his father?" She was only a couple of inches taller than he was, and actually had to lean _up_ to press a kiss onto his forehead. "I could never regret that."

"Demo... if we fight..."

She laughed again and stepped back out of attack range. "I'm dead, remember? You can't hurt me any worse than that... No matter how much a wound hurts, it's just a physical sensation to work past. What kind of ninja would I be if I was afraid of a little pain?"

He took a deep breath and drew a kunai in either hand. "Okay... 'Kaasan. I'll do it."

The straight, tapering sword sheathed across her back slid out in a smooth, effortless arc. "Show me."

* * *

"Ohayo, Rin-sensei."

"Ohayo, Neshan-kun. How are Kabuto-kun and Konchuu-chan these days?"

"She... it was a mission, a couple months after you died. But he's doing fine; keeps throwing his Chuunin exams."

"Oh... and you?"

"I'm a Jounin."

"I knew you could. So, I guess we'll have to-" She blinked as his hands came up in a quick series of seals. "Kawarimi?"

The girl who dropped out of the cloud of smoke that technique left behind was fast and good - she caught her balance and evaluated her surroundings even before it had completely cleared. "Wha?"

Rin laughed. "My student seems to have thought you'd have a better chance against me than my summoner."

"Your... Oh." Her student's student - and how odd that felt to think, since the last she'd seen of him he'd still be younger than this girl was now - nodded slightly and settled into a taijutsu stance she didn't know. "Alright, Inuzuka-sensei. But I need to help my teammates, so I can't let you stop me."

"Ara? Inu- oh, the bandages. No, they're just... hiding something I don't like to be reminded of. But you're in a hurry, so let's go."

Sakura blinked. "Hai!"

There was a moment of tense watching, and then they moved. Sakura lunged straight forward, so quickly that the chakra she used to get the necessary traction blew deep craters with each footfall, and Rin flipped up and back out of the way in a storm of Bunshin.

Being able to deploy jutsu without hand seals was a rare ability that relied on a combination of a certain natural talent at somatic memory and long years upon years of intensive practice - in short, in the user's being able to learn the desired skill so deeply and instinctively that it became as automatic as blinking.

The fact that_ Rin_ could do it, even for so basic a thing as Bunshin no Jutsu, told Sakura a great many things, none of them good. First, it meant that, despite her relative youth, the Jounin was extremely experienced, and would have a corresponding reserve of strategies and surprises. Second, it meant that the window of time she needed to produce a nin-or-genjutsu was drastically shorter than Sakura's battle plan had accounted for - even if she could only do that with the basic three, that would be enough to distract the younger ninja until she could deploy the more powerful attacks for which inexperience and simple lack of conditioning would allow no counter.

Arrogance and false modesty aside, Sakura knew that, in hand to hand combat, a Chuunin-level Taijutsu specialist - which she _was_, for all intents and purposes - could match or exceed most Jounin who didn't share their specialty. That being the case, her plan had been to push the intensity and proximity of their combat to such a degree that Rin would have no opportunity to pull away and form seals, forcing the competition onto her _own_ home ground.

But Rin didn't _need_ seals, and that made a difficult position nearly impossible. If the younger ninja wanted to win this, then she'd need to either lay a trap - with no time to prepare or concentrate - slip in and land a winning hit before the ghost could react - which sent her right back to her original problem - or somehow manage to survive until her opponent ran out of chakra.

The trap was probably her best bet. Wires or a shuriken launcher would take too long, a deadfall or pit was completely out of the question... she wasn't carrying enough explosion notes to rely on those... They'd be useful, of course, but her actual plan would have to be based around rolling from Rin's attacks and pretending greater injury than she had truly suffered - the broken wing gambit, as it was called.

For now, shuriken as a distraction, trying to push the Jounin over towards the edge of the clearing they were parallel to. In the woods, her opponent's superior training in stealth and misdirection should, theoretically, move the advantage that way, so unless Rin noticed her efforts and decided to fight them just out of paranoia or sheer cussedness, the other _should_ cooperate.

The ghost _did_ play along, flipping herself to the side and through a roll before coming up into a crouch and a rapid flicker of hand seals before slamming a fist into the ground before her. "DOTON: FUNKARENSA NO JUTSU!"

Sakura had never heard of the technique beforehand, but 'Eruption Chain' sounded like a name for something with both vertical and linear aspects - as indeed it proved to be, a narrow line of explosions that went off in sequence like a boat through water, scattering sharp-edged chips of stone shrapnel into the air at perilous speeds. Fortunately, she was already evading, launching herself up and to one side then tumbling carefully away into the underbrush.

The shattered chips of rock stung her legs a bit, but not nearly enough so to justify the gambit she'd be using.

"FUUTON: FUUNOYA NO JUTSU!" _That_, on the other hand, would be perfect, if she could survive it.

The Wind Arrow wasn't terribly destructive, even for one of the relatively inefficient wind ninjutsu, but the slender spears of chakra-locked gas it threw were more than dense enough to pierce flesh, and their relatively delicate shells had given the jutsu's inventor room to add something else entirely.

They could seek their targets.

Sakura perched on a branch in the lowest level of the forest canopy and waited. Leaf twitch - squirrel. Flutter - songbird taking flight. Faint whistle -

She had had her shuriken ready and used them to intercept most of the transparent distortions coming at her. A careful twist and backwards fall accounted for another's miss and she was able to swat the last two along their 'shafts' as they tried to arc around to take another pass. A couple of quick, superficial slashes with a last shuriken and an understated yelp of pain, just like those she had kept releasing when Neshan-sensei started to walk the team through the basics of self-control in combat, as a final touch and she could let herself fall backwards into space.

Then she was busy trying to fall in a way that _looked_ injured but didn't end up cracking her skull open when she hit the ground. Even **with** that caution the impact was stunning, and she had barely rolled to her feet - with an only half-feigned stagger - when the pop of a Kawarimi and the spearing pain of a stab wound announced her opponent's arrival.

She didn't need any more encouragement than that to lunge away and spin back up into a combat stance.

Rin smiled at her, and twitched a needle-thin blade of chakra out along each index finger. The younger kunoichi swatted her first strike aside effortlessly and intercepted the second with a blindingly quick kick to that elbow, but when she tried to counter-attack the Jounin used that tiny opening to snake her uninjured arm around the limb that had deflected it and slash her fingertips across Sakura's triceps.

Then the shorter girl slipped a foot up between their centers of mass and kicked her through a tree. It didn't really slow Rin down and wouldn't have even if she'd still been alive, since that kind of kick, launched from so close, could never build up the speed it would need to injure someone with a Jounin's conditioning. But, it did do what Sakura had intended it to do and open the distance between them.

They paused and assessed each other for a moment, trying to determine the effects of injuries both real and imagined. Sakura's kunai wound had miraculously missed both the major organs and large blood vessels of her lower back, but it was still bleeding steadily. The blood loss wasn't severe enough to affect her function yet, but likely would if she didn't get it bandaged within the next minute or so. The burning slash across her upper arm was more concerning, since it had required no weapon to inflict, but a carefully hidden tensing of that arm proved that, while it was weakened and would hurt like hell to use, it _did_ still work. Best of all, though, she had managed to keep up the pretense of her illusory injuries during the short clash.

Rin made a pro-forma attempt to cover her charge with a swarm of shuriken, but neither of them were in the least surprised when Sakura twisted effortlessly around them and straight into another chakra-blade strike, this time aimed at the major blood vessels of her throat.

Which she ducked smoothly underneath even as her good hand was reaching up to grab the Jounin's upper arm and use it as a pivot to swing up and around behind her. Rin probably could have escaped the hold without too much trouble, but since Sakura would have been too close for a dangerous kick and would have needed to let go and render a critical moment's warning for an open-hand or weapon-based attack, she chose not to, in favor of shedding momentum and readying herself for another spinning Chakra Mesu strike.

By the time she felt Sakura's knee coming to rest between her shoulder blades and her left hand under her chin, it was too late and they were already falling forwards as the Genin's weight threw her off balance.

Rin's neck broke with the wet, final 'cruch' which is unique to living bone, and her killer started to fish out a medical kit and its bandages as she stood and moved away.

* * *

He came out of the Kawarimi tense and ready and facing his opponent.

Her face twisted into a terrible snarl. "You."

"Yes."

"You interrupted me."

"Yes."

Her eyebrow twitched, and then she visibly reigned herself in. "You're going to pay for that," she told him. "Even if I _did_ want to talk to you anyway."

"No," he said, and swapped places again, this time with a largish branch on the other side of the clearing.

She threw out a palm, launching a... ripple... of chakra, intense enough to be visible, that crashed through the tree he had landed in and sent its crown tumbling to earth. Fortunately, he had already been in motion, launching himself up and forward in an arc that peaked more than a hundred feet above the ground. Their gazes met for an instant as he seemed to hang in the air, and he smiled and launched both fistfuls of kunai - a full thirty, a personal record - in a ragged and none-to-accurate spray.

Then they multiplied, sixty, one hundred twenty, two hundred forty, more. "kagekunai no jutsu," he murmured, and carefully failed to keep smiling when a tightly controlled whirling sphere of chakra knocked them from the air and scattered them, tumbling, across the entire field.

He landed with a tap, and she laughed.

* * *

Sasuke stared, involuntarily meeting swirling red eyes in a face all too much like his own. The other was a young-looking man, seeming not more than twenty, and dressed in the black body-glove and gray armor that, for all of its wearers' usual reputation, came straight out of his own nightmares.

"Shisui-san?" he whispered.

Shisui chose to reply with a battoujutsu strike rather than words. Attacks like it were generally rare in Konoha's sword styles, but had come to be heavily favored against the Uchiha, since their speed meant that, Sharingan or no, they could often be executed before their target could react.

Sparring against Sakura, Sasuke reflected as he ducked and rolled away from the flashing blade, had been _remarkably_ good practice for dealing with this.

Shisui turned his blinding opening into a broad sweep, but the alteration cost him the split second his target needed to throw himself back and away. "Shisui-san... why are you so angry? What have I done?"

The older of the two pulled up short in disbelief. "What... why... _What_ have yo-! You're the one who fucking _killed_ me, _ITACHI!_"

Sasuke flinched, and his world seemed to go dim and spinning as his mind involuntarily tried to run back through each and every memory of his life, checking and comparing to see if, if... "I'm not Itachi," he choked. "I'm _not!_ I'm _Sasuke!_ I'm-"

"BULLSHIT!" the other roared, with a handful of cast shuriken. "That face, those cold fucking eyes... You think I'll turn my back again! I was a fool to think there was ever anything better in you!"

The small, three centimeter shuriken most Konoha ninja carried were intended more as a nuisance and a distraction than an actual threat. They were compact enough to be carried in large numbers, but their awkward shape and light mass made it extremely difficult to put enough force behind them to put their blades through any amount of flesh, let alone the tough fabric of a shinobi's field uniform. Unless sheer luck - or unlikely skill - put them into an eye or a major blood vessel, they were essentially harmless.

That was the only thing that saved Sasuke's life, since he was too shocked to even react to Shisui's attack, let alone _dodge_ it. One star buried itself in his thigh, and another slashed across his cheekbone, but all the rest only stabbed at bone or lacerated muscle too dense to penetrate.

Pain is a wonderful focusing agent, and despite his shock, some corner of Sasuke's mind more concerned with survival than emotion or self-worth was able to use his training, both in the Academy and after, to lock away the fear and pain and horror with an internal promise to deal with them later.

In the meantime, he had to either get away from that kodachi or get_ it_ away from its wielder. In melee combat the weapon gave Shisui more than twice his reach and many times his killing power, and at longer ranges his active Sharingan would make him almost immune to the genjutsu that Sasuke had been specializing in since his graduation. He knew _some_ new ninjutsu, of course, but his opponent would have at least as much and almost certainly more, so_ that_ was a wash, too.

He didn't bother with the Bunshin he would usually have used before ducking back into the undergrowth - again, because his opponent's Sharingan would have been able to identify the clones at a glance, and made its usual distraction value entirely worthless.

"KATON: HOUSENKA NO JUTSU!" Shisui roared from behind and below him, and the scattering stream of fist-sized fireballs barely missed him as he slipped away, leaving smoldering craters in the bark of the trees he had been standing in front of, and charred, drifting ashes where others had had low, leafy branches. He used the distraction to run up the far side of one of the larger nearby trees and went to 'ground' in its upper boughs, still and quiet as he tried to steady his breathing.

Nuke-Sakura was just as smart as his teammate - she had not only selected their opponents for the greatest possible emotional trauma, but had been careful to select options whose strengths neutralized their own. Most of his arsenal was useless against another Uchiha, and Naruto's... mother, he supposed... was obviously a melee-focused weapons user, which would make her extremely difficult for her range-focused son, and so on. Probably if he could trade off with even one of his teammates they would be able to defeat them and gang up on the remainder, but the woman's madness obviously hadn't affected her ability to plan, and she _had_ to have known that just as well as he-

"I can hear you, you know," came the choked, hating voice from below, and even as he threw himself out of the way of the Ryuuka the figurative lightbulb of inspiration was going off over his head.

It was a well known maxim that a genjutsu could no affect a sense that its target did not have, and equally certain that a target who could perceive more with their targeted sense than the genjutsu's caster could - like a Yuuhi's ability to see the farther colors, or an Inuzuka's boosted sense of smell - would be able to use that greater acuity to break the illusion by picking out flaws that the caster couldn't have known to correct.

From that, logically, one of the Sharingan's oft-suspected but never-admitted weaknesses could be deduced - because it was based in its owner's _visual _sense, it shouldn't be able to assist against genjutsu targeted at the other four senses. Admittedly, those other four represented less than ten percent of all known genjutsu techniques, but he still knew far more than ten techniques. If any of those others were suitable...

Ah. _That_ one.

He lunged back into cover, slung off his pack, and used Kawarimi to swap it into a tree some several hundred feet away. As expected, Shisui caught the motion and sent his next attack after the pack. The shade would check, of course, if only to gloat, but the few moments of confusion that would take were enough for Sasuke to finish his seals, raise his fingers to his mouth, and-

PHWEEEEET!

"Calling for your dupes, _Itachi_? They can't help you!"

Sasuke checked his resources - shuriken, three kunai, and some wire. His tags and the Fuuma Shuriken had been in his pack, and there hadn't been time to retrieve them. Then he shouted back, repeating what he knew to be a useless argument. "I'm not Itachi! I'm Sasuke! You've been dead for four _years_, Shisui-san!"

He had prepared himself to dodge another attack, but Shisui chose to rage at him instead. "Bullshit! You think I don't recognize those soulless eyes! You think I don't know that heartless face! DO YOU REALLY THINK I'M STUPID ENOUGH TO LET YOU STAB ME IN THE BACK _AGAIN!_"

To recognize his eyes... his were the same as he'd seen... Sasuke shook his shock off and tumbled forward and down out of the tree. It was a long fall, but a lasso of wire and a conveniently placed branch let him turn his vertical momentum into a precisely measured amount of the horizontal kind - by tugging the loop closed, he made the wire bite into and through the wood, cutting his anchor free at precisely the right moment.

Shisui sneered slightly, and set himself for a ducking cut that would combine Sasuke's momentum with the blade's edge and motion to quite literally cut the Genin in half.

The younger ninja smirked and bend himself double in midair with one of his remaining kunai in hand. When the inevitable moment came, he straightened and kicked out and bounced himself off of the kodachi's edge - safely, since the steel kunai acted as a shield for his sandal's relatively vulnerable sole.

The dead man had been thrown slightly off by the heavy impact where he had only planned for the usual resistance to a cut, and the time it took him to recover and come back on balance were enough for Sasuke to flip back and land and catch the kunai whose hilt dropped neatly into his hand. There was a deep, bright score along the flat of one side and the damage would weaken its structure enough that it wouldn't be worth keeping past the end of this battle, but it had come through the experience much better than his foot would have. They traded looks for an instant - Shisui snarling and bringing his sword up to strike, Sasuke calm and already poised to attack.

Then he drove the kunai into his heart.

Shisui grinned and coughed up a mouthful of an ugly black liquid that smoked in the open air and burned as it splattered across the living ninja's skin. "You can't kill a corpse, Itachi!"

And then he was swinging and Sasuke was flipping back out of the way as the kodachi came so close - _too_ close - to his nose. "I've dealt with that before," he sneered, remembering those nightmarish puppets that had come for Tazuna as he threw his two remaining blades - not at Shisui, but into the trees on either side of them, where they served to anchor the glittering strands of wire stretched after them.

Shisui lunged again - and had he always been that slow, or was it being dead that was throwing him off? Or maybe he was just too used to Neshan-sensei and Sakura - and Sasuke ducked under it with a spin on his heel and a twist of his wrists as he passed them over his head and then he was sprinting away and pumping chakra into the singing strands of metal.

The revenant's eyes widened. "No," he said, in the spit-second before the wires went taunt and their closing loops sliced his body into a dozen different pieces.

Sasuke skidded to a halt and turned back to assess his handiwork, and his eyes widened as he saw the scattered chunks begin to melt back together into a coherent whole. Dammit! What did it take to finish him! It was like trying to fight some unstoppable juggernought or...

His mind flashed back to the seal-laden tag that Nuke-Sakura had buried in each of the three ghosts.

...golem.

Obviously, the flesh shell didn't matter - he could cut it into as many pieces as he liked and it would still recover. But damage the tag and, like any fuuinjutsu, it would be shattered.

Easy enough.

Shisui was pulling himself upright now, face a mask of rage and his kodachi lying forgotten to one side as his fingers flexed through involuntary strangling motions. Sasuke met his eyes and smiled anyway, and triggered the genjutsu he had set up earlier.

From as far away as its caster was standing the noise was merely skull-splitting, but at point-blank range it had an almost physical impact - Shisui doubled over and involuntarily brought his hands up to try and protect his ears, and Sasuke could see more of that acidic black ooze trickling out from beneath their protection.

The late ANBU was tough and well-trained and his fall went no farther than his knees, but it gave Sasuke the time to take three long bounds backwards and run through the rapid seals needed to...

"KATON: RYUUKA NO JUTSU!" The Dragon Flame was the most intense ninjutsu he knew, and its burning spear carved straight though its target's chest and skull. He had already started to dissolve when Sasuke's control relaxed and let the stream of flame spread out and flare over the corpse.

* * *

When she got a hold of that 'Black Guardian' character, she was going to give him one of her special treatments. Perhaps something along the lines of what she'd given Shino, with the ants and the sulfuric acid and that _lovely_ amplification jutsu.

Still, while he might have sold her a line about having a_ real_ second chance, since this place was so warped and deluded from what had actually happened, it _was_ a halfway decent playground, so maybe she'd only regenerate him once.

Nah.

She had to laugh, though - this guy might be an imposter trying to fill shoes too big for him, but he wasn't actually half bad for all that. Not too smart, maybe - he obviously didn't know when it was time to run - and real short on actual _power_, but he had some skills and he was no slouch at applying them.

Still. She had questions to ask him, so she started working up a heavy binding jutsu - Senei Jashuu should do the trick. He crouched, just slightly, and her Byakugan saw a minute flicker of chakra arc down and ground itself into the earth a tiny split second before he vanished in a brilliant yellow flash.

Two flashes, actually - one where he had been standing and the other right behind her back, and very close, so close that his entire face was hidden in her blind spot. His hands opened, releasing a cloud of tiny slips of paper to flutter in the air, each of them bearing... Her hands flickered through the seals automatically. Kawa-

flickerFLASH

-rimi and he was there _before_ her, grinning, with more Explosion Notes drifting on the breeze and already flaring-

flickerFLASH

BA-BOOOM

She rolled forward out of the burning tree and landed on her feet with a slam. Pieces of charred flesh tore free at the impact, leaving blood to ooze out for the few moments before her regeneration seal repaired the damage and generated new skin underneath the old, leaving entire blackened sheets to crackle and dissolve away.

He was standing on the other side of the field, watching her, and as he raised his hand to point straight at her one of the complex knots of chakra bound to five of his Heavenly Gates spun free and up and out of his arm and finger.

GA-KAM!

What she'd just seen was impossible - a jutsu being triggered without any external hand seals or internal chakra control - and that preoccupied her for the fraction of a second it took for the attack to hit her.

Raide no Jutsu was a powerful elemental attack, one of the most dangerous of the Lightning types, but it had been a long time since she was weak and pathetic enough to roll over after only a single blow. She came back upright, ignoring the quickly fading burn through her chest, set herself... and moved.

She had things she wanted to know, so she didn't hit him full force. Just enough to liquefy his intestines, rather than scattering fragments of his extremities across the landscape. He doubled over most satisfactorily, but then vanished with another yellow flash and flicker of chakra.

Vanished to behind her, where he was lunging forward with kunai in hand. She twisted to respond, but-

flickerFLASH

-he was crouching down low to her right and exploding upward, blade-first, and this time she was too slow to stop it going home but not too slow to bring that elbow down, hard-

flickerFLASH

-and he was falling towards her with another kunai in hand for a killing stroke as she turned her momentum from the previous two blows into additional speed that brought her foot up and across before he could react and blasted him across the field and through three separate trees.

"ow, ow, ow, _shit_," she heard in the distance, and then-

flickerFLASH

-he was standing across the field, glaring. His hand came up - another slight flicker of chakra around it - and then he was holding a slip of paper, which he threw with a triggering chakra burst like for an Explosion Note and as the Jutsu unwrapped and expanded to take effect she recognized it, another Raide but this time she wasn't shocked and twisted aside.

He threw a second Raide, and a third, four, five, six, seven and then she was in the right position and the right balance to launch herself forward and under the eighth and slam a full-power blow into his chest and knock him flying while the ninth Raide Note fluttered harmlessly to the ground.

Something was bothering her. Something she hadn't recognized, something she was missing... wait.

A slight flicker of chakra... Her eyes widened. "Oh." And if that was, then... her eyes darted around, cataloging the kunai he had scattered across the battlefield with that entirely too obvious leap. "Oh."

He blinked as she formed the first seal - his hand came up - second - twisted slightly - third - molded the chakra - fourth - caught the Raide Note as it slid out into his palm - fifth - threw it - sixth...

She smiled, and the now blank sheet of paper fluttered to the ground. He swore in a language she didn't recognize.

* * *

Naruto's eyes narrowed as he rushed forwards, and somehow he wasn't surprised when that straight, tapered sword flicked through the space where he had been the moment before his instincts threw him sideways.

"Ne, Naruto-kun," his mother said. "That won't be enough. I know you can do better."

He grinned and flicked both of his kunai at her, then sprinted to the right as he ran through the seals for- "FUUTON: SHIROKAZE NO JUTSU!"

She batted the physical blades casually aside and wrapped her sword in a brilliant sheath of chakra to slice the rushing stream of the White Wind and divert it harmlessly to either side, then laughed. "So quick! That's excellent!"

He narrowed his eyes. She might or might not be able to do the same thing with more concentrated jutsu types like water or earth, but keeping that heavy blade in hand would keep her from forming hand seals - which would mean that -

Oh. Or she could do that.

His mother finished her jutsu's last seal - tiger, with her sword balanced between thumb and forefingers the way Sensei had taught him to do with sealing scrolls and drew back and inhaled as she brought her fingertips to her lips.

He knew what came after _that_, and wasted no time hustling through Kawarimi - and not a moment too soon, as the Goukakyu's blast shattered the tree he had been standing in front of. Kagebunshin as he landed - his new location was closer than his last, and she was sprinting rapidly across what distance there was - and then straight into another Kawarimi as she ducked under one clone's kick and casually speared another in passing as she spun in close so quickly that her next killing thrust scattered sparks off the small boulder he had switched with.

She spun quickly to face where he was standing on the other side of the clearing as his clones scattered and pelted into the trees. "Naruto-kun," she said, almost whispered in the still quiet of Naminokuni's late afternoon. "Kagebunshin is dangerous. If you..."

Her son shook his head quickly and tried to grin reassuringly. "No, no! I've got the endurance for it, 'Kaachan, and..." abruptly, he dropped the mask and let one hand rest gently across his belly - and the seal branded on it. "It's not like I can mistake which one's the real me, is it?"

She sighed in relief. "All right," she said, then shook off the reflective mood and changed stances - body perpendicular to him, knees bent and feet spread wide, right hand holding the sword's hilt above that shoulder and the other steadying the blade as it sloped forward and down. Her smile widened to a grin, and her eyes gleamed devilishly. "So, what next?"

Naruto took a deep, pained breath, and braced himself. "This," he said, and then his clones launched a savage barrage of ninjutsu from all sides.

For a moment or two, it was hard to see anything past the washing tides of air and water chakra and the billowing clouds of Katon flame and Doton dust, with all of it lit from within by the blinding glare of lightning jutsu. Then the obscurment cleared and he could see her tattered, bedraggled form standing with that long spear point blade held weakly in one hand.

She was smiling. "Ranged ninjutsu applied at a rate I can't match, and from too many different directions to deflect or counter. Well done. But, I'm already dead, Naruto-kun. _Neither_ of us can stop me as while her seal is still buried in my neck."

Naruto's thoughts hiccupped as he realized the implications of her words. Sensei had said that Edo Tensei anchored the spirits of the dead to specially prepared corpses, and in retrospect it was obvious that what he and that _nightmare_ that had stolen Sakura-chan's face had gone through with the thrown kunai was about whether or not she was going to be able to apply the final elements of the anchoring process. His mother's words had not only called that to his attention, but had also as much as flat-out _told_ him that breaking that final seal would shatter the jutsu and...

He could see in her eyes that she knew _exactly_ what she'd just said.

He knew, he could tell half a dozen different ways to take advantage of that fact, and twice as many ways to get close enough to do so. Knowing how the thing was possible made it suddenly, horribly real. "I understand, 'Kaa-chan," he whispered. "But... I can't."

She looked stricken. "Can't?"

"I can't hurt someone I love like that. I can't... be alone again. I can't let you die again."

"Naruto-kun..." his mother cast about for a moment, desperately. "This won't last forever." As she spoke, she was walking towards him - slowly, haltingly, unwillingly closing the distance between them. "There's only so much chakra in the seal - I can... feel it running out."

"But..." he was crying freely, now.

Their eyes met, and hers were no drier than his. "I have to try," she choked, "but, to kill my own son... I'd _rather_ die."

"'Kaa-chan..."

"Please," she begged... and struck.

He ducked away, but not quickly enough, and however talented he might have been, she was better-trained and far more experienced. If the clones he had dispatched for his earlier attempt at ninjutsu hadn't come piling out of the trees and swarmed over her, then he almost certainly would have died.

She fought brilliantly, he thought as he scrabbled back out of her immediate reach. There wasn't a single motion she made that didn't end in the sharp 'pop' o a dispersing bunshin, and his eyes widened in horror as he saw the last of them vanish.

His mother stepped forwards, sword raised. "You _are_ a great ninja, Naruto-kun. More than your father and I ever dared to dream." She took a slow, wavering breath. "Is there... anything... anything you'd like to say?"

He met her eyes, and saw that they were as wet as his own. "I love you, 'Kaachan."

The explosion note the last clone had wrapped around the kunai it had buried in the back of her neck was only a small one, and that batch of Kagebunshin couldn't have had much power left, so its detonation was only enough to outline her figure in flame and create a shallow crater in her... substance.

But that crater went deep enough.

She staggered, eyes wide and shocked, then fell to her knees and raised one hand to watch as a wash of earth-brown seemed to flow up from her fingertips, as though the life in her was being drained away through some point higher on her body. Then, as the earth and sand of that hand began to dissolve away into dust and the brown reached her shoulders, she looked up and met his eyes with a smile. "Naruto..." she said, and now her neck was covered. "I'm... so proud..."

He wanted to look away. He wanted to cry. But every moment, every memory, was precious as nothing else in his life could ever be, and so he forced himself to watch as the life in her face was swallowed and the reflection of it swept away as dust on the evening wind.

* * *

"Checkmate," Sakura said. Her opponent knew what jutsu that was, from his expression, and he knew what it did, and knew there was no point in pushing things until _she_ came to _him_.

He started to walk across the battlefield. "Fuuinshuku no Jutsu. Not many people know that. I'd figured Orochimaru might think of it, but... Damn."

She giggled. "Oh, you _are_ ambitious, planning to fight one of the Sannin."

"I'm already doing that, or close enough. Besides, you never know if you don't try."

"Y'know, I think you might have managed it," she thought out loud. "Do they tell you you're a genius? Because they should - figuring out how to bind complex Ninjutsu to written Notes, let alone your own Heavenly Gates, and that fake Shunshin of yours... Using seals built into kunai which you could throw where you wanted to go as anchors for an instantaneous transposition jutsu... That was brilliant."

"Fake, hell. This's all the Body Flicker ever was."

Her eyes widened, and she tapped her chin. "Really? You must have started very early, to have Yondaime there to teach you."

"He didn't." Neshan's patient progress stopped just outside that range which she could cover in a single lunge.

"Sugoi." She cocked her head as his eyes narrowed in concentration. "Where's Kakashi? Because you know you're impossible."

"Elsewhere," he said, with the air of a person who enjoys being helpful.

Her eyes flashed at his evasion, and then she sniffed. "This is _wrong_. Even _he_ isn't a big enough hypocrite to run away and leave a team without their sensei. So where the _fuck_ is Team 7's _real_ Jounin?" she asked herself.

Raiken, the Lightning Blade, funneled a constant stream of chakra out of the user's palm, which extended out to a distance of perhaps a foot before arcing back into the user's Inner Coil System. It wasn't really anywhere close to as destructive as the Chidori it had inspired, nor any technique on that level, but in close combat it was more flexible, and it added noticeably to the user's reach - which, in combination, was why he kept a single execution of it as one of his precious eight reserve techniques.

GAZAZAKRAKZAKRAKZAZA

"RIGHT HERE!" He lunged, sweeping the flaring, popping blade of raw chakra up and around. She dodged, leaning back - barely - out of the way, and he brought his other foot forward to come on balance and transferred the jutsu from right hand to left - ignoring the shocking bolt of pain as his Inner Coils system protested the unaccustomed load - and into a blinding thrust that she ducked under by falling back onto her hands then flipped back up and over as he brought the Raiken back down and then she was upright and he was coming forward again as she turned, started to spin...

"HAKKESHOU KAITEN!"

And then he was flying through the air and everything along the front of his body was a single mass of pain.

He crashed to the ground and came back up on all fours with his uniform coat and vest fluttering in tatters over gleaming, unscratched armor from head to toe, but she was standing twenty feet away and smiling, and he met her eyes defiantly and the world was black and green and blue and red and spinning and melting and merging and...

He was lying on a table, with his limbs and head tied down. The sky was red, and the sun black.

"Tsukiyomi," he said. "An offensive visual genjutsu based on the fully activated function of the Madoiringan bloodline. It allows the user to take full control of the target's senses, including that of time. However, due to the complexity of the task and the delicacy of the necessary pupil characteristics when compared to the necessary chakra load, subjective duration is limited to a maximum of seventy-two hours." A pause. "Tsukiyomi, and _you_. Fuck."

She leaned forward into his vision and laughed. "Isn't it, though? And now, would you like to tell me everything you know before, or _after_ I start?"

"I'm stubborn. After, please - but do remember you're on a time limit." He grinned like a death's head. "I will."

She laughed again, and picked up the first scalpel.

* * *

"You're very good," said a woman's voice from behind her, and Sakura froze and spun to look when she heard it.

Rin smiled and twisted her head as though trying to relieve a sore neck. "You would have killed a ninja two full grades above you and walked away without any major injuries... if I were really alive."

The Genin stared in shock, but her racing mind came up with a plan in almost the same instant that instinct had her hop over the sweeping low kick Rin had launched after replacing the shrub behind her. It was desperate, stupid, and almost completely suicidal, but it was also the only way she could think of to stop and opponent who could regenerate like _that_.

"You seemed too alive to be just a construct - but I guess that that would make sense, from what Sensei said about this 'Edo Tensei' thing." She brush a lock of hair that had escaped its braid back out of her eyes and resolutely ignored the bolt of pain the motion sent stabbing out from the upper edge of the patch of chill stickiness she could feel starting to creep down her leg. "Che!" she sniffed, for once relishing the departure from the feminine speech her mother had worked so hard to teach her. "Now I _really_ don't have time for this!"

"No, I guess you don't," agreed the woman who had made it so. "But if your control is always as good as it was while you were tweaking your core chakra to mislead me like that, you might want to look into learning some medical ninjutsu before the next time you go out in the field."

Sakura laughed, and this time the pain was too deep to completely ignore and so sharp she winced visibly. "I'll do that. But let's do this, first."

"Right!" Rin laughed too, then began to seal.

Even with chakra anchoring them to the ground, there was a strict physical limit to the amount of traction that Sakura's feet could exert. Against most opponents, what she _could_ do to increase the usual amount was more than enough, but her resurrected foe's ability to carry out an essentially instantaneous replacement mean that even the time it would take her to accelerate though her target's reach would be too long.

Which was why she'd dragged this into the forest in the first place. Rather than forwards, she sprang _back_, bringing her legs up as she did so to plant them flat against the trunk of the tree behind her.

And, abruptly, traction was no longer an issue.

She hung in that gravity-defying crouch for the moment or so it took to draw a kunai in each hand - not long enough for Rin to think and suspect what she intended - then launched herself in a flat, blurring arc quicker than even _she_ had expected.

The sudden lightness where her braid's weight had been and the chill, liquid hiss of a water ninjutsu an inch or so from her ear told her that she had moved not a moment too soon - and then her body mass and the speed of her flight were concentrating all their inertia behind the razor-fine points of her kunai and driving them forcibly into the gaps between the dead woman's shoulder bones.

There was no chance of bleeding her out, of course, and she'd be able to pull the weapons free with her teeth if nothing else, but all Sakura needed was a moment.

And, as she vaulted up and over the weapons and Rin tried to turn her own fall into a vertical double-kick, she knew that she had it. The Jounin's sandals caught her on her earlier wound, but the pain wasn't enough to spoil her landing as she sank down low to the ground and slapped a hand against the small of her opponent's back.

Then she ran like hell.

Rin had only a small moment to smile and say, "Bravo!" before the stack of seven overcharged explosion notes went off as one.

* * *

The nightmare wearing his student's face was glaring as the world finally spun back into reality around him. "How the fuck did you do that!"

Neshan chuckled, dryly, and forced his screaming body back into a combat stance. "Think about it."

She crouched and went through three quick seals before extending her clawed hand in front of her, with the other bracing that wrist.

BACHICHICHICHICHICHICHI

Nothing else in all the world sounded quite like that. Even at his best, he couldn't dodge a Chidori - and after the Tsukiyomi, he wasn't anywhere even _close_ to that. Which meant that he'd have to endure it. The flip side of that, of course, was to carry the Lightning Edge home, she'd have to enter _his_ range... As vicious and destructive as Kakashi's brainchild might be, it still couldn't equal the Shikouseibaku's shattering power - and he had three of those left.

He set himself, and waited.

"I don't care what you know anymore," she yelled over the roar of escaping chakra. "You've become a problem."

CHICHICHICHICHICHICHICHI

Seen in animation, Chidori looked stupid and obvious - simply running, clutching a ball of lightning. The difference between that and reality, he had a split second to think, not for the first time, was really nothing more than simple speed - speed that drove the eyes to tearing slits from wind force, speed that shifted the entire world around the attacker into a flashing blur - speed that could cover hundreds of feet literally in the blink of an eye.

He knew, as he made it, that she would see and react to his counterstrike. Fortunately - from one point of view - her response was as he had expected.

The Shikouseibaku received its effectiveness thanks to the way its individual component streams converged - the first, and most obvious effect, was that having a number of different forces acting inwards in a ring combined their overall effect to transfer the greatest amount of energy to that portion of the target. The second was that, by having several different rings going off in sequence, not only would the overall energy be amplified again, but it - and the physical matter being incidentally carried along in the rush - would be driven and directed_ into_ and _through_ the target, with such intensity that no realistic defense could hope to resist it.

Chidori disrupted other jutsu by applying such intense energies that the organization of the opponent's effort dissolved like butter dropped in a fire. The Shikou's finely tuned timing made it _more_ vulnerable, not less, and the strike she had adjusted to meet his own blasted it outwards into scattered shreds - and then continued on to do the same along the entire line of his arm, from wrist to shoulder.

And then her momentum carried her hand out past his body and, as he had planned all along, he was spinning as he fell and bringing his right leg up and out _just_ quickly enough to brush his toe across the skin over her nearer kidney.

Again, the sixty-four streams. Again, the flare. Again, the concussion.

It threw her up and away as momentum and gravity slammed him down to skid along the ground, and even before he looked to follow her he was forcing the one-handed seals for a basic medical ninjutsu past the building pain. Even the greatest medic-nin would take time to recover from having half of her internal organs explosively relocated, and _this_ kind of bleeding couldn't wait.

It hurt, cauterizing his shoulder like that, but he didn't have more than a moment before she recovered and he had to make his move in that window. Her stomach looked like raw meat and he landed on it with one knee, and his hand stabbed down as her eyes widened...

The Shikouseibaku annihilated her head and most of her shoulders, and dug a deep hole into the soft earth.

Then she poofed away into smoke and a freight train hit him in the chest and knocked him tumbling.

He rolled back upright and kneeled where he had landed, remaining hand splayed out, while his chest heaved as he tried to regain his breath. When he looked up to meet her eyes again - no danger of a second Tsukiyomi, since the shock of performing that technique would have stunned the fine muscles necessary to control it for some time yet - her lips were drawn back from her teeth in a horrible snarl, and, for the first time, her hunched posture told him that she hadn't completely repaired the damage he had done her.

They stared at each other for a long, hating moment, and then she drew herself up and spoke. "You'd have eaten Orochimaru alive. But I'm better than he is, and now you're mine."

TO BE CONTINUED...

* * *

Author's Note: Dude. Am I an evil bastard or _what_? Unfortunately, chapter five is only half done, so, given how (un)reliable I tend to be in other things, there's no telling how long you'll have to wait to find out what happens next.

On the other hand, having people commenting and keeping the setting fresh in my mind _would_ be a help, so please, comment, do, and contribute to my efforts to make my muse get off her lazy ass and write.

Ja, -n


	5. Destiny

**TEENAGE GENIN NINJA HEROES**

chapter 5

DESTINY

* * *

JULY, 12TH YEAR AFTER THE ATTACK OF THE KYUUBI

Konohagakure no Sato no Tokubetsu Jounin Bakusuta Neshan and his opponent stared at each other for a long, hating moment, and then his favorite student, Haruno Sakura's, nightmare doppelganger drew herself up and spoke. "You'd have eaten Orochimaru alive. But I'm better than he is, and now you're mine."

He closed his eyes for a moment, then let his head fall - so that she wouldn't see the triumph in his face.

"RAITON: TATSURAKURAI NO JUTSU!"

Tatsurakurai no Jutsu, the Dragon Thunderbolt, was the most chakra-intensive elemental ninjutsu ever created. It was also one of the least efficient, which was occasionally a blessing in disguise. For a ninja who insisted on regarding it merely as a destructive attack, it was impossibly wasteful - but, one who was ready to recognize the advantages granted by - pardon the pun - the shock value of its blinding brilliance and deafening report could make it an extremely useful part of their overall strategy.

Regenerating her body to even the extent necessary to overwhelm Neshan's battered carcass - after the expenditures of the earlier fight, and supporting the demands of three separate resurrections - had cost her almost all of her remaining chakra - so much so that even the relative pittance needed to maintain the Byakugan was too great a cost to spare... which meant that Naruto's attack was a true blindside, and knocked her effortlessly across the battlefield to slam into and through the trunk of an unfortunate tree. It swayed, leaned, and finally crashed to earth, and then there was a moment of silence broken by the brushy clatter of small branchlets falling loose and tumbling through its foliage before the clearing echoed with a wordless shriek of rage that was intimately familiar from the all-too-common times when Naruto gave in to temptation and indulged his prankster's appetites at his female teammate's expense.

Part of the crown of the fallen tree exploded, sending branches large enough to be fully grown trees in their own right flying and tumbling end over end through the air as a red and pink blur erupted from the leaves and flashed across the battlefield towards her attacker. Naruto's eyes widened, and he tensed to dodge, but even his astonishing endurance had been badly taxed by the ninjutsu he had just used, and before he could even begin to move her hand flashed out and snatched a drifting thread of glitter from the air in front of her as she planted her feet and skidded to a halt.

She stared at what she had caught for a moment, then sneered and looped the wire around her palm and _yanked_. The thin strands of metal bit deeply into the flesh of her palm, but Sasuke was hauled bodily out of his blind and into her reach. He twisted as he fell, trying to ready himself for the blow he knew was coming, but she swatted his block aside with a single casual hand, then slammed the open palm of the other into the center of his chest a split second before he touched down.

The blow broke several of his ribs - not all, not enough to make the entire ribcage give and jab sharp fragments of bone into vital organs, but some - and knocked him back to tumble limply across the ground before her.

It also gave Sakura - the younger Sakura, the real Sakura, the one with skin clear rather than scarred, and aquamarine eyes rather than Frankensteinish red and white - the opening she needed to lunge out of cover and into a furious fullisade of blows that seemed to hammer in from every direction at once...

To no avail, as the older kunoichi shrugged them off like the waving of a baby's arms and slammed one knee into her younger mirror's stomach before straightening that leg and sending her victim flying as her hands came up to begin the seals for the finishing blow.

The Genin forced herself to her feet, ignoring the throbbing pain of internal bleeding in favor of the more immediate danger of that... nightmarish copy.

Who was doubled over, on her knees in agony. Sakura hesitated, and her doppelganger raised her head to glare at Neshan. "Tessa," she hissed, and he smiled.

"In the smoke from those explosion notes."

"You'll pay," hissed a voice like the bowels of hell, and then she teleported away.

* * *

At first, by some mutual, unspoken agreement, they didn't talk about it, instead concentrating on healing their wounds - as far as they could be - and making ready for the night.

Eventually, however, their camp was as comfortable as it could be made, and the questions had to be asked. Neshan levered himself up to sit against a tree and looked his three students in the eye. "I guess I owe you some answers."

Both of the boys looked at Sakura.

The team's sole kunoichi took a long, ragged breath, then looked up from staring at her own white-knuckled fists. "That... she was me. Wasn't she? Somehow."

He took a breath of his own, let it out, then nodded slightly. "After a fashion." He paused to let them grope for something to say for a moment, then explained. "The way I understand it, is that time... branches. For every decision, every chance that _this_ could happen or _that_ could happen, there are two futures, one for this and one for that. As we live, we... observe, decide, which actually happens... That woman was pulled from... a future which is no longer possible."

She had tears in her eyes, and her voice was pleading. "I won't... become..."

He hesitated a moment, then, "No."

She swallowed. She'd known him long enough to recognize that mannerism. "You're lying."

Neshan looked away. "No one can know the future for certain. No matter how insane or ridiculous the possibility, it is, by definition, possible. So... I can't promise that there's absolutely no chance of your becoming... something just as bad. But I can't say that about myself, either." He smiled, then, trying to reassure her. "Can you even understand... how she got that way? Can you see yourself doing it?"

She had wrapped both arms around her stomach and bowed her head, as though trying to ward off some chilling wind. "...yes," she whispered.

Her teacher looked stricken, and his eyes darted, trying to find some way to convince her otherwise.

"I can't," Naruto said. "In her eyes... she was so afraid, so scared. The Sakura-chan I know could never be like that. She's, _you're_, too strong to be that small."

She sniffled and scrubbed her eyes dry with a fist, then gave him a smile like a flash of sunlight on a cloudy day.

Sasuke's voice had broken early, and the roughness from the way it had been handled during the earlier fight dropped his baritone into a threatening rumble. "How do you know that?"

Neshan took a deep breath, then let it out in a huff. "When I was... twenty-five, I think it was... I was living in a city a long way from home, working as a teacher. I got home from work and there was a man in my apartment. He said that he was... an agent for a worthy cause. That he was, if not a god, then something close enough that the difference would never matter to me.

"He did some things... provided enough evidence that I had to take him seriously. Then he told me that there were... others... equal to him and his, but opposed. Dark. Dangerous."

"Like Kyuubi?" Naruto asked.

"Far worse. That the two factions were engaged in a struggle along lines that were... close enough to how we look at good and evil, but that they couldn't battle directly. That the backlash from that sort of struggle would destroy the reality they all wanted preserved, for one reason or another.

"So, instead, each of them recruited agents, champions, who they could move to other worlds to work for their cause.

"Which was why he was talking to me."

Sasuke nodded, fitting the pieces together. "And, if you're an agent of one side, then that alternate Sakura is your opposite."

The Jounin smiled and settled back slightly, then winced as the motion irritated his damaged shoulder. "Exactly."

Naruto squinted. "Huh. If these gods are equal, shouldn't you be that... person's equal?"

Neshan made a sort of 'more or less' wave. "The way he explained it to me was that each side kept a running total of 'points' that they could expend recruiting and outfitting their agents. Grabbing That Woman the way they did, the bad guys have spent a lot of points on this world, but they've had to compromise on other fronts to do so. I'd never defeat her in a million years - but if I can teach_ you_ to do it, I win anyway, and even... even if everything goes wrong for us, my patrons have been able to use the points they saved by only getting me to win victories on dozens of other worlds."

Sasuke blinked, and both of his louder teammates were a little pale. "You really think we could..." Naruto whispered.

"There's a _reason_ I call you guys the Junior Legends."

Sakura swallowed audibly. "But... wouldn't you two have arrived at the same time? If you were supposed to oppose each other?"

"I'm not _completely_ without support, remember. Arriving early was one of the bonuses I got - along with a certain degree of foreknowledge."

Sasuke gasped, and Neshan met his eyes. "Yes, I knew about your clan."

Sakura and Naruto went deathly quiet and met each others eyes for a moment, trading silent messages. Then, subtly, almost imperceptibly, they slipped a little closer to Sasuke and turned to face their teacher.

The older ninja observed their consolidation with a certain amount of satisfaction. Not a moment of thought or a word spoken needed for them to come together in mutual support - exactly what they'd need later on. Then he sighed and leaned his head back against the trunk of the tree, looking up at the sky.

"What I know - knew - was only one of an infinite number of possible courses of events. The slightest change - one person thinking of one thing at one time that they otherwise wouldn't have - could snowball and then suddenly nothing looks the way it would have. Having your clan present and alive would have been far more than a minor change, and jeopardized everything I'm responsible for seeing done."

Sasuke was trembling, with his lips drawn back from his teeth and hands fisted so tight their knuckles were pure white. "_You_..."

"For all that, though... My last advantage was a... a degree of intuition into which changes would matter and which wouldn't. It wasn't important that your family actually be gone, merely that... they seem to be.

"So we tried to arrange that - genjutsu, spies, a plan... we hoped that... by using the right kind of illusions, by being ready ahead of time, we'd be able to smuggle the Uchiha into hiding, while still making Itachi - and everyone else - think that he had killed them."

Sakura laid a supporting hand on her teammate's shoulder, but he wasn't reacting to anything at all, and Naruto picked up the slack by looking at their teacher hopefully. "So, they're..." his voice trailed off at the other's expression.

"...a few."

"What?"

"The first steps went off perfectly - what you saw that night... none of _that_ actually happened. But later... someone talked. We'd put them in safehouses, five of them, until we could move them to a secure location outside of Konoha, but... He missed the smallest of them, but the others..."

So high, then such a disappointment. "Chichiue and Hahaue... they'd have been at the largest. Leading."

"Yeah."

Sasuke closed his eyes and took a deep breath. His parents were gone, but he still had other family. "Can... can I go see them? The ones who..."

"No."

The Genin's flashed open and his fists clenched, digging up handfuls of dirt, and his voice was choked and harsh. "No! You tell me that my clan, my _family_ that I've been mourning for, for _years_ is _alive_... that I've been _lied_ to - by you, by _everyone_ - and now you won't even show the _fucking_ grace to let me _see_ them!"

Neshan dropped his eyes from the sky and met Sasuke's gaze glare for glare. "No, because a mission, a plan, which has been in the works longer than _you've_ been _alive_ - a mission which is _vital_ to the wellbeing of thousands of individuals, to the survival of Konoha, to the very fate of this world as a whole - rests, utterly, on a certain, very well-informed individual believing that you and your brother are the _only_ surviving Uchiha. Because you are being _watched_ by his agents. Because even the _slightest_ chance that you'd be followed and the ruse discovered is too much. No."

Even choked and raging, Sasuke could think quickly. "I'm bait."

"Yes."

They glared for another moment, and then the younger ninja's eyes dropped. "...How long."

"Not more than a year."

"Swear it."

"On my honor as a ninja, our intelligence on the enemy's plan indicates that he will move _exactly_ as soon as we provide a given stimulus. The last element of our counter operation will be in place no later than this August, presumably leading to action some time in November or December."

"He'll try and take him at the Chuunin Exam?" Sakura asked.

"Yes."

Sasuke took a deep breath and tilted his head back to look at the sky, and some subliminal tension in his features seemed to flow away. "I can wait that long."

The others relaxed also, Naruto with an audible sigh, but then Sakura blinked. "Wait, if you knew about her like _that_, what did Haku-san tell you?"

"Until I talked to him, I had no idea of her _name_... I knew to expect someone from-" he made another vague little wave of his hand, "-_elsewhere_, but who that would be, or where they'd be from... he was the one who gave me that piece."

"Why didn't you tell me then?"

'Huh?' Naruto mouthed at Sasuke.

'Don't ask me, moron.'

"At first, I was hoping to avoid her, at least for now," Neshan admitted. "And later, well, there wasn't time."

Sakura frowned. "I guess so..."

"What does 'tessa' mean?" Sasuke threw out, breaking the awkward silence that followed.

Their teacher seized the opportunity with both hands. "It's a poison that inhibits the body's ability to generate and carry chakra. It's not terribly dangerous if you know it's there, because it doesn't last very long and because it can't make you... able to use less than you're currently using. But, if your usage dips while it's in your system, then trying to bring it back up will be massively painful for as long as the poison lasts... and, once it's completely absorbed, will no longer be possible at all.

"For a moment there, near the very end, she relaxed completely. Right now, Sakura, her chakra capacity is actually lower than yours, despite the difference in experience. She'll still be able to grow her chakra naturally, but if you can match her _rate_ of growth then you'll always have that advantage. Either way, it'll be years before she's ready to match against a Jounin again."

All three of his audience sighed slightly. Knowing that was a relief, knowing that, next time, they'd at least have a fighting chance rather than a forlorn hope.

Then Sakura had a horrible thought. "Sensei? Are_ all_ of our missions going to be like that?"

* * *

"'Neechan!" Sakura glanced up at the shout, but still barely had time to catch the lavender-and-black blur before it could slam into her midsection. She had expected that response, of course, but _not_ the instant she opened the door. "Hey, hey! Careful, chibikko! I got stabbed there!"

"What!" Haruno Katakuri yelped and flinched back, eyes flicking up and down her three-years-older sister's height, looking for some sign of injury. "Omigod! Are you okay! I didn't hurt you, did I?"!

Angelic smile - _too_ angelic. "I missed you?"

Sakura squinted. "Okay, what did you do?"

"Who, me?"

"_Yes_, you - I've had a hell of a week," the ninja of the family snarled, not above playing the sympathy card to get her way, "I'm looking forwards to taking a _break_, and the last thing I need is to spend th-"

"Sakura!" their mother cheered, swooping in and sweeping her oldest daughter into a smothering hug. Unfortunately, as glad as the girl was to see her mother for the first time in two months, one of her arms was clamped _right_ across the wound that That Woman's summon had put in her back, and it _hurt_.

Sakura hissed in pain, and slipped out of the hug with a careful twist and a gentle application of leverage - she could have done it by main strength, but there was no sense disturbing _both_ of them with how much she had changed even since graduation. Her mother unconsciously smoothed out the wrinkling the maneuver had left in one silk sleeve and blinked at her daughter in confusion mixed with hurt.

She tried to smile reassuringly, but anticipatory dread made it hard. After all the talking and persuasion it had taken to reconcile her parents with her chosen career and convince them that she'd be _just fine_, telling them she'd been injured, and on her first time out, yet, was _not_ going to be pleasant. "I'm glad to see you, too, Hahaue, it's just... Hug a little higher, please? That area's still kind of sensitive."

"'Still kind of...?'" Haruno Asuna's eyes widened in sudden horror, and she patted her hands aimlessly across Sakura's shoulders and arms, reassuring herself that her daughter was really there. "You were hurt! Darling, are you-"

She cut her mother's rapid stream of words off with a single gentle finger across the lips. "I'm fine, Hahaue. Just fine." She paused for a split second, and cocked her head. "Is Papa home today? So I can explain everything at once?"

"Right here, sweetie." Unlike his wife, Chairman Haruno Saffuron of the Haruno Trading Group was a large, powerfully built person, as those born into the Haruno clan tended to be, and his quick hug seemed to swallow his daughter's slender frame entirely. "What did you need to explain?"

The latest heir of a shinobi tradition stretching back centuries too a deep breath, then began. This was _not_ going to be fun.

* * *

"Iruka-sensei! Iruka-sensei!"

'It was hard for you, wasn't it, Naruto?'

Iruka-sensei wouldn't have said that if he didn't - not _then_ of all times. He wanted his student to do well, to be happy and successful, so knowing how well the mission had gone should make him glad.

It was kind of sad to think of it that way, with what had happened to Tazuna-san and all, but the nightmarish creature Sensei had taken to calling 'That Woman' had been unbelievably strong even for a Jounin, strong enough that just getting away with their lives would have been a victory, let alone driving her off so that the bridge could be finished from the plans its late designer had left.

Sensei had said that he'd talked the Naminokuni authorities into counting that as satisfying their contract, in return for his recommendation that the inevitable mission upgrade _not_ be added to that contract's cost. Sensei'd also said that it'd likely be counted as an S-class mission, which'd go a long way towards getting him the recognition - all three of them, really, each for their own reasons - wanted and needed.

So Iruka-sensei would be glad to hear about it, and with the Academy teacher having been the first, the very first to care about _him_ for any reason at all...

Naruto would do almost anything to make Iruka-sensei glad.

It wasn't a school day, and it was almost noon, and Iruka-sensei had told him once, when they were sharing ramen during the rainy summer months when almost everything in Hinokuni ground to a halt, that the new Genin would always be welcome in his home.

So he only knocked twice, quick bangs of knuckles on wood, before throwing the door open and charging inside.

Iruka's apartment wasn't all that large even by the modest standards of administratively posted Chuunin - a single room with enough space for a bed and a table and a couple of chairs without feeling _too_ crowded, and a little counter and sink and two-burner stove along one wall by the claustrophobic closet that held the toilet - so Naruto was able to take in the entire space in a single glance.

He had been willing to barge in like he had because he knew that it was too late in the day for his teacher, a habitually early riser even when he _didn't_ have a class to teach, to still be asleep - yet there he was, mostly buried under the bed's badly rumpled covers. "Iruka-sensei!" he yelped. "Are you okay! Or sick! Do you need-"

A pair of shuriken thunked into the wood of the door frame beside his head, and a minimal shift from within the pile on the bed found the intruding Genin fixed by a baleful, if sleepy, glare. "go 'way..." she hissed, then flopped her head back down into the curve of her host's neck.

Belatedly it occurred to Naruto that Iruka-sensei was not in the habit of leaving clothes strewn randomly around his apartment, and neither did he own a Tokubetsu Jounin coat or black miniskirt. Further, although her hair had been the right length, neither face nor voice nor bare, scarred shoulder had borne much resemblance to those of his adoptive elder brother - or even a man at all, for that matter.

The graceful thing to do would have been to apologize politely, turn, then leave quickly and quietly, being careful to close the door on his way out.

"GYAGH!" Naruto screamed, and ran for his life.

* * *

Hyuuga Neji looked up at the man who had just walked into his cell, and tensed. Hiashi met his nephew's gaze for a moment, then sighed and looked down. Neji had been learning the subtle cues of his uncle's body language for literally his entire life, and could see that something in his own demeanor had answered the question the older man had entered to room intending to ask.

"I heard your conversation with Hinata after your hearing," the head of their clan said, calling the memory to the front of Neji's mind. Their talk - argument, to give it its proper name - had been nothing new, with her trying to wrap him up for her larder with sweet, promising words and him casting the attempt aside, both of them going back over ground they had trod before.

"What of it?"

"When I was sixteen... My father told me the 'duties,'" his voice gave the word a vicious turn that made Neji leave off his stubborn glare at the back wall of the cell and turn to meet his uncle's eyes, "of the Main House to the Branch. I tried to ignore it. I tried to change it. I said I wouldn't hurt my brother that way... They said I _had_ no brother!" He snarled the words like they still burned, like he was an inch away from wailing them. "If you believe nothing else I say today, though, believe that the only reason I stopped trying was that everything I did, the old men _chose_ to take as rebellion by those they controlled, and punished through the seal..."

The boy's lips were drawn back from his teeth as he finished taking in his uncle's words. "You're a _liar_," he hissed. "I _saw_ you use it. I _saw_..."

"_Yes_, you saw," Hiashi snapped, with a thickness in his voice and tension in his jaw that said as much as any number of tears. "You saw the _least_ those old bastards would have accepted for what I sensed - for what I couldn't have hidden if I tried!"

"How do _you_ know that?"

"Because it had happened before! I tried so many times, but I could _never_... I never..."

No more snarl, now, but eyes still cold. "And now?"

He looked away, and spoke quietly. "I won't try to claim I've always honored the promises I made, then. Not as well as I should have. But there have been no new curse seals since my grandfather's death - _will_ be none, while I live - and I can at least give you and Hinata the support and protection Hizashi and I never had."

"And the Council?"

"They'd already stolen my brother from me even years before he died. What do I owe _them_?"

There was silence for a long moment. "This can't make up for sending my father to die rather than pay for your own actions," Neji said, almost mildly.

His uncle flinched, then took a deep breath. "'So please tell this to Neji,'" he said, voice not entirely his own. "'That I am choosing death of my own will, to protect my son, my brother, my family, and the entire village... Brother... I wanted, just once, to disobey the Hyuuga destiny... I wanted to choose my own destiny, that's all.' ...That was the last thing Hizashi ever said to me..."

* * *

"Absolutely not."

"Hahaue?" She had been afraid of this.

"You are telling me that this supposedly _safe_ mission ended up involving _poison_ and, and _torture_, and _murder_, and, and we're supposed to let our little girl stay involved in something that only a _fool_ would think wouldn't get even _worse!_" Asuna's voice had started her statement flat and brittle, but it rose steadily towards the end. "No! You're, you're going to stay _home_, and _safe_, with a wonderful husband and no more scars and beautiful children and... and..." abruptly, she seemed to run out of words, and sat a moment with her jaw working before she burst into tears.

Sakura hopped over the table - a horrible breach of manners, of course, but if Hahaue was distracted lecturing her least elegant daughter then she _wasn't_ worrying about... But she was too upset to notice or care about the action as her daughter settled in beside her and wrapped gentle arms around her shoulders. "Hahaue? Hahaue, please. It's all right - I'm fine, I'm safe, I'm right here and I'll be good as new by tomorrow..." she pleaded.

Saffuron reached out and laid his hand gently across his daughter's cheek, and for once none of the half-a-dozen siblings clustered around the edge of the drama complained about the favoritism. "And next time?" he asked softly, with a worried look in his eyes.

Asuna was not a woman given to physical contact or open displays of affection, and it was a measure of her distress that she leaned into her daughter's embrace rather than reasserting the aura of serene dignity that was usually as much a part of her as the perpetually-worn pair of gorgeously inlaid combs that had been the first gift she ever received from the man who would later become her husband. "There won't _be_ a next time," she hissed frantically.

Sakura turned her head slightly to nuzzle into her father's caress, and started rocking in place slightly to try and smooth out the tension singing through her mother's body. "Everything we talked about before I left is still true. Most missions aren't anywhere near as bad as this one. Neshan-sensei even said that this was the worst one _he'd _ever had." She paused for a moment, then took a deep breath and said the hurtful thing her sense of honesty demanded. "But... even if none of that were true, I still couldn't stop."

Saffuron's jaw tensed slightly, and Asuna paled and seemed to shrink in on herself.

"I couldn't walk out and leave my friends, my comrades, in danger when I might have helped them."

**Especially,** whispered the shadowed voice of her conscience, **when the danger is _you_.**

**

* * *

**

The atmosphere in the exercise room was already tense and cold when a pair of Branch Family guards led Neji out into view, with his cousin Hanabi padding quietly along behind.

Hyuuga Inei was making a speech, but Hanabi tuned his voice out and ignored him just as thoroughly as she ignored the official witnesses, Main and Branch families alike, standing solemnly along the chamber's walls. Her concentration was reserved solely for her sister.

Once, before Uncle Junnan had left, she had thought Hinata was wonderful - so pretty, tall and elegant (at least to a six-year-old's eye), as mature in carriage as some court beauty as she stood by Uncle's side, as lovely and awesome as the mother neither of them could remember.

Then Uncle was gone, and the illusion came crashing down. The quiet but unyielding defender who had warded her from the jealousies of the other children of the clan couldn't string three words together without stuttering. The deft fingers that had pulled such beauty from a loom fumbled if they tried to so much as knot a piece of string. The gentle hands that had guided her through the first steps of her instruction in the Jyuuken couldn't swat a gnat, let alone deal a true blow.

For a long time, Hanabi had hated her sister for betraying her faith like that, but now it just made her sad, as they faced each other in the plain black body-gloves clan custom mandated for a student of the Jyuuken, quietly sad for the distance between them.

So, shocked as she was, when Hinata stepped forward to sweep her into a hug, she returned it fiercely, and stared as they stepped back, puzzled at the words her sister had whispered in her ear.

"Begin!" Inei called, and Hanabi lunged, struck, just as their matches had always gone before, since almost before she could remember.

This time really was different - rather than dodging or blocking, her sister counter-struck, meeting her blow with her own hand and a flare of chakra that, to the sensitivity of an active Byakugan, was almost blinding.

The younger girl fell back, reassessed, but even the split second that took was too long and she found herself hopping narrowly over an arcing leg sweep that trailed blue-white fire along the floor of the training hall. The palm thrust came while she was still in the air and lacked the traction to evade, so she had to block it. Some instinct - prompted perhaps by the flaring power behind her sister's previous strikes - made her do so with both hands, one braced behind the other to meet the strike, and both of them reinforced with the full weight of her chakra.

It was barely enough.

The physical impact of blow alone was enough to knock her back out of engagement range, and both of her palms felt like solid disks of fire - even in comparison to the arcing chains of sparkling agony shooting up through her forearms and elbows.

Chakra burn occurred when a person's inner coils were forced to carry more power than they were prepared for. In a minor case - such as she could identify hers as being - it was 'merely' painful, as the coils were abruptly forced open to the necessary level. The degree and scope of the pain, however, said quite clearly that that single quick strike had come very near indeed to_ not_ being minor.

Said that the sister she had so hated for being less the hero, for being _weaker_ than a still younger Hanabi had worshipfully believed... was easily powerful enough to shatter her entire chakra system with a single strong blow.

The words Hinata had whispered in her ear before the start of the match made so much sense now. 'I'd do _anything_ to protect you... except kill an innocent.'

The fear that had made it so easy to defeat her older sister hadn't been of pain, or of failure - it had been of _herself_, of what she might do with a single loss of control.

Her father had tossed her like that in their practice matches often enough that she came back on balance and into stance without a hitch. Their eyes met across the dozen or so feet between them, and Hanabi had to giggle. "Baka," she said, and didn't realize she was crying until she had to sniffle to continue. "Baka! I don't need a protector - I need a _sister_."

The heir of the Hyuuga swallowed softly. "But..."

"I'm strong," she said. "I won't break."

A deep, slow breath, and a smile that, for the first time in neither knew how long, was hopeful as much as it was sad. "Okay." The soft, feminine expression across from Neji's proxy had never been anything but determined, but now, indefinably and without any physical change, there was something both of play and of challenge about it. "Show me."

Power was one thing, but Hanabi had her pride - and holding back or not, Hinata _had_ lost those matches. "You first."

The older sister's smile got a little wider, and the younger was actually _grinning_, and then they moved in the same beat.

* * *

Uchiha Sasuke looked around himself as he walked once more among the crumbling wreckage of a once-prosperous district... and cared.

When he was alone, it hadn't mattered that the painted signs along the business streets were peeling. It hadn't mattered that the winter rains had carved deep gullies out of the hard-packed earth of the roadways, or that grass was sprouting along the higher ground left behind. It hadn't mattered that the houses' shingles had curled and split, or that the frames were rotting out from underneath them.

Nothing mattered to the dead. And everything that had mattered to him _was_ dead.

The only thing that the living could give the dead was vengeance, so that was what he had had to settle for.

But they were _alive!_

Not all of them, not the ones most important to him, but _some!_ 'Someone, anyone to care for,' as he had told Naruto on their trip back. And their homes _would_ matter to them.

Sensei's plans would limit what he could do to prepare for their return, the demands of secrecy being what they were, but as the Uchiha's last surviving representative in Konoha, the care and well-being of the clan's assets was _his_ responsibility - a responsibility that he had, in truth, been failing. If even a chance remark had driven that fact, that awareness home, then a sudden and lasting attention to the Uchiha estate would not be outside his established character, however, then he would have an excuse that would allow him to fulfill _both_ his duties, to clan and village alike.

He glanced up as he moved into his bedroom - checking for traps and ambush, yes, as any shinobi would, but more meeting the gazes of his parents as they looked out at him over the shoulders of his younger self from that long-ago festival night, all three of them smiling and happy in their grand holiday kimono. There were other photos along the shelf next to that one - cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents... every Uchiha save one. He still had some pictures of _him_, from group shots small and large, but they were locked away where he couldn't accidentally catch sight of them in a bad moment and destroy precious memories before he could regain his control.

Except for the red and white paper fan hanging from one wall, and the newer picture thumbtacked to the windowsill over his desk, the aging photographs were the only decoration in the room.

Moving to the desk and taking out a sheet of paper, he began to write, quickly and efficiently, soon covering both sides with his handwriting's characteristic square, neat characters. The first step would be finding someone - or several someones - both willing and competent to go through the district and identify which buildings needed which repairs, as well as which ones would need to be condemned and completely replaced. After that, such roofing and structural worked as seemed most urgent would come next, then the interiors and external paint once all the houses were to the same point and ready for them. It would take longer doing things that way, but spreading them out would let him cover a greater proportion of the work out of his own pocket, saving a greater share of the clan's funds for when the others returned.

Then there'd be the roads, although the city might be willing to help cover the costs of that, and supplies of goods suitable for long-term storage.

'In case of emergencies,' he'd say, which brought to mind that he'd have to be careful to seem slightly cracked rather than aware of something his audience wasn't.

Eventually he stopped and looked back over the list he had written, then nodded internally and blew gently across its surface to dry the ink before he rolled it up.

'Someone, anyone to care for,' he'd said.

As he turned to go he paused, then pulled the thumbtack under the window out and slid its photo into a frame, which he then set beside the one of his parents at the festival.

'Hey, what does that make us, chopped liver!" Naruto had answered.

Three new faces grinned at his back as he left - Neshan was kneeling in the center with one arm punching victoriously into the air and the other - the one he had lost - wrapped around Sakura's waist as she stood beside him. She was resting one hand on his nearer shoulder and mirroring the triumphant gesture with the other. Naruto stood behind their leader, throwing one arm out in a victory sign and dragging their scowling final teammate into the frame with the other.

* * *

Most of Hanabi's successes against her sister had been due to Hinata's own fears and lack of confidence - but by no means all of them. For all her youth, the younger sister's reflexes were superb, and her kinesthetic sense, her awareness of her body's position and motions, was exception even by the exalted standards of the Hyuuga, whose combat style relied heavily on such awareness.

So the battle was not _completely_ one-sided.

Hinata, for her part, was not without advantages. She was older and more experienced, with five critical years' difference in reach and pure physical strength. Her endurance and condition were superior, again thanks to the added time the older sister had had to spend developing them, and thanks to her Jounin-sensei's efforts to heal the damage to her spirit, her chakra was far close to its natural almost-overwhelming levels than it had been even as recently as the Genin Exam.

Hinata struck first, this time, a straight palm thrust from her off hand backed by enough chakra to knock the smaller girl halfway across the room, but her sister slipped under and to one side of the strike even as one of her own hands stabbed out at the abdominal coil junction carrying chakra from Hinata's heart to her legs.

The elder sister twisted away from the attack quickly and gracefully, but with only partial success. The intended target was missed, but Hanabi's strike still disrupted part of the chakra flow through her sister's abdominal muscles - not a truly dangerous injury in and of itself, but one which would inhibit Hinata's ability to move, attack, or evade.

Hanabi had just begun to smile at her success when her sister's knee seemed to come up from below and to one side as though out of nowhere and slam her jaw closed with an audible 'crack!'

As much as half the audience winced sympathetically, and Hanabi herself staggered as the impact knocked her off her stride before recovering in time to deflect her sister's quick follow-up.

The younger girl fell back a couple of steps, making a mental note to be wary of further attacks against her head. The Jyuuken only rarely made use of such, because there were only a handful of tenketsu there and all but a couple of them were quite minor, but it was rapidly becoming clear that her sister meant to integrate 'hard' styles into her more conventionally Hyuuga 'soft' tactics to take advantage of her greater mass and strength.

Hanabi's lesser height gave her a considerably shorter reach than her sister, making holding the range of the engagement at arm's length a fairly bad idea, but that same weakness might also be turned into an advantage. The relative difficulty of projecting chakra from parts of the body other than the hands created a zone of vulnerability very close to any Jyuuken user's body, and Hanabi's shorter arms meant that _her_ vulnerable zone would be smaller than her sister's - creating a narrow range band where her attacks would be effective but her sister could not effectively respond. Hinata's integration of conventional taijutsu into the Jyuuken would partially nullify that, of course, but since nothing in that direction had been seen from her before she had to be new to the style, and would not yet be able to use it to best effect.

With that in mind, Hanabi charged - straight into her sister's sidekick.

She folded almost in half around Hinata's foot and fell almost straight back under the impact. The taller girl came in on the offensive as she hit the ground, but she managed - somehow, barely - to roll upright and out of the way of one attack, then zag in and around another kick to slide in close and finish the motion exactly where she wanted to be. Strike _there_ and _there_, then-

Hanabi's eyes widened as her third strike skidded off of an entire _sheet_ of chakra blocking access to her sister's body as Hinata spun to face her - then kept going.

"HAKKESHOU: KAITEN!"

As Heavenly Spins went, it wasn't much. Hinata only made one full revolution, and inexperience made her chakra release noticeably irregular - so much so that she was badly knocked about by the completion of the technique. However, as was becoming her custom, the young Heiress of the Hyuuga made up for her relative lack of precision with the judicious application of simple brute force, and spent enough chakra on the technique to knock her opponent literally across the room.

Then she lost her balance and fell flat on her ass.

Hanabi pried herself off of the far wall with a muttered word that she very much hoped her father hadn't been close enough to make out, then took a deep, centering breath and changed stances. Her sister's _real_ power was just as impressive as she had remembered, and if she wanted to win then she'd need to do something drastic. If she didn't, then it was blindingly obvious that the only question would be whether it would be the internal burns or external pounding that knocked her out first.

The older of the two had recovered, and came in in a lunge and Hanabi tensed and counter-struck and did something she had never even dared to attempt before.

Two. Four. Eight. Sixteen. Thirty-two.

Sixty-four.

She had missed at least half of her target points, but still hit enough that Hinata gasped. Coughed. Staggered. Then fell.

Hanabi walked closer, ready to make sure of the thing, then doubled over, gagging, as her sister rolled up on her shoulders and straightened both legs in a double kick that picked the smaller girl up bodily and knocked her flying. Another quick flurry of motion and it was all over, with Hinata kneeling with one knee in the small of her sister's back and one finger resting on the rarely-visible tenketsu that connected brain to spinal cord. "D-do you yield?"

The defeated girl smiled. "Hai... Oneesama."

* * *

He didn't, in strictest terms, _need_ to be in the hospital. If there had been sufficient need, he could easily have fought with at least _most_ of his full strength - well, what had to be counted as his full strength now, which would never be the same as it had been - but a few days of bed rest would greatly speed his overall recovery, so here he was in an embarrassing gown that further revealed the detailed seal work tattooed around his remaining arm and across much of the rest of his body, trying to do his paperwork left-handed.

"Well?" came a voice from the door.

He sat his work aside with a sigh. "'Well,' what? I fucked up by the numbers."

"Neshan-kun, you ask too much of yourself," the Sandaime Hokage chided gently. "You couldn't have known what you would face."

"The hell I couldn't!" the younger man snapped. "Tazuna _told_ me she was there, _told_ me what she was capable of even before we'd left Konoha! Then _Zabuza_ - I didn't even _think_ about what it'd take to blackmail him, to threaten him. I was so blind, so fucking _cocksure _that things'd go the way I remembered that I never even _considered_ turning back until it was already too fucking _late!_"

Sarutobi Chieshamaru carefully refrained from giving vent to a sigh of his own. Intelligent, dedicated, and caring he might be, but their time working together since the day what looked like a five-year-old child had turned up on his doorstep with a very strange story indeed had proven to him that it would take days, perhaps weeks, to work simple common sense past the younger man's savage intolerance of his own failings. Still - best to start the process now. "Enough! Your team is alive, the customer was satisfied. You did _not_ fail."

A moment's mulish glare, then Neshan let out his breath in a huff. "All right." He stared straight through the wall for a moment, then spoke. "My errors and That Woman aside, I think that things went fairly well. The O-Tazuna-Hashi is complete and trade is already starting to pick up. We've added a powerful new bloodline to those resident in Konoha. Naruto's made his debut, and Akatsuki's probe team should be on its way fairly soon. We've identified my opposite number and at least a few of her goals and motivations - my account's already on your desk; we'll probably want to have Anko-senpai talk to Sakura for more insight. I managed to catch the bitch with a doze of tessa - full effect, so it should take her out of the game for at least a year or so. The stress seems to've gelled the kids together even better than we'd hoped." He paused. "And... after the way That Woman threw their nightmares at them, I though I owed them some honesty."

If that meant what the aging Hokage thought it did, then that had _not _been part of the plan, and had most definitely _not_ been authorized. "And?"

A shrug that was no longer so badly pained as a few days past. "Mostly it was minor stuff or bringing them up to date on my background, but Sasuke managed to put enough pieces together to suspect the worst about his family. I gave him the truth, or most of it anyway, and he's willing to cooperate with the plan as it stands. On the way back he was thinking of making some changes in the Uchiha holdings, but said he had an idea to disguise it - either way, I made him promise to run everything by you, first.

"Past that - nothing else to report."

* * *

Neji felt happy, for once, and while his body ran repeatedly through the rote motions of the Jyuuken, most of his mind worried and fretted at the strange new feeling like some querulous grandparent confronting a change in their routine.

It would take time, and no little amount of it, for the memories and lingering feelings of wrongs done to fade and leave his uncle and the two girls who called him 'big brother' as _family_ rather than strangers connected by blood...

But he had time, and he knew that that day would come - it had been sealed by his promising Hinata the ally she had been seeking, and by the way Hiashi had slapped down the Clan Council's attempt to have Hinata's victory overturned on the grounds that her 'uncouth behavior' (in other words, her use of taijutsu other than the Jyuuken) was 'unbecoming of the noble and glorious heritage of the Hyuuga' (words failed him.) He knew it was coming - and he looked forward to it.

With that thought, and a typically restrained smile, he finished his last kata and turned to go inside and to bed for the night.

Then an overwhelming wall of force picked him up and slammed him against the broad trunk of one of the massive trees overlooking the Hyuuga clan compound. He blacked out momentarily from the impact, but was brought straight back to consciousness by the stabbing lances of pain that pinned his spread-eagled hands to the rough bark.

He couldn't activate the Byakugan without his hands free, so the owner of the feminine voice that whispered, "You can't escape destiny - it just never means what you thought it did," into his ear only registered as a flash of color in the corner of his eye - red and white and pink - before everything went abruptly dark.

TO BE CONTINUED...

* * *

**Author's Notes:** It's so much fun, being evil.

Sorry about the double-post thing; I forgot that ffnet's abomination of a text-handling system devours real formatting and had go back and redo that. Next chapter... lord, I dunno. Hopefully sometime between Christmas and New Years, but I make no promises.

Let me know what you think!

Ja, -n


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